How Important Is Age Of Domain? Options

[xyZed]

I have washerhelp.com which was registered and hosted about 6 and a half years ago. 2 years later I registered washerhelp.co.uk and following advice from Ammon I parked it and pointed the co.uk name to the existing .com site.

Most of my IBL's are now to the .co.uk domain.

However, I am moving hosting companies and had in mind to reverse the situation - that is, make the co.uk domain the actual site and point the .com site to it. Because I'm based in and targeting the UK it makes sense to me.

It's suddenly concerned me as to whether this could potentially affect my SERP's? I know the age of a domain name is suspected as being a positive factor for a site, and my .co.uk domain name is a couple of years younger, but is there much chance of this change being detrimental to my rankings at all?

This post has been edited by xyZed: Mar 7 2007, 09:52 AM

[backgammonnn123]

I have seen sites go down because of the age of the domain but i also think the strength and quality of your inbound links have alot to do with keeping u ranked well. My seo proved it by taking a pr zero site to no 1 in google in 3 months. Make sure ur inbound links are solid.

[rmccarley]

Changing domain names sucks. It's an SEO nightmare.

[Aaron Pratt]

This case would not be a question of age but will search engines follow the redirects I hope you put in place for each page when you move it back.

[A.N.Onym]

It'd be interesting to hear Ammon on why he suggested focusing on the .com domain, when the site was UK oriented. Maybe he thought the age bonus was better than the .tld domain?

In any case, any links to the domain, you redirect to, should help.

Keeping the 2nd domain alive and hosted for months should be a good move, too.

Most likely, you'll lose some traffic for high competitive phrases, as age does play a role. However, you should also be getting more local (UK) customers, I suspect.

This post has been edited by A.N.Onym: Mar 7 2007, 09:39 PM

[xyZed]

This case would not be a question of age but will search engines follow the redirects I hope you put in place for each page when you move it back.

Links on my entire site are full links including the http://www and they all point to washerhelp.co.uk - however, there are no files at washerhelp.co.uk, this domain is parked and pointing to washerhelp.com. All files are uploaded to the .com site. I've only just realised that this means all clicks to my pages within my site have to be diverted to the .com hosting. Is this crazy?

My ideal would be that as my new hosting arrangements allow me to upload files to either .com or .co.uk it makes sense to switch hosting the files to the actual co.uk hosting and point the .com name to it.

I was all set to do it when it suddendly dawned on me that although most of my inbound links over the years have changed to the .co.uk domain, the .com name is 6 and a half years old but the co.uk name is about 4 and a half years old and wondered if there could be adverse search engine results effects - not only because of the age difference but what about the physical moving of all files to a new domain name (albeit one that's just got a different extension)

I'm hoping I'm being unnecessarily worried and that because both domain names have been inextricibly linked all the time that it won't make any difference - or even could be beneficial to UK results?

This post has been edited by xyZed: Mar 8 2007, 04:47 AM

[klikhir]

Old domain names are worth keeping and you're probably better of purchasing old domain names (2 yrs plus) when starting a new web site.

If you have an old web site with many pages indexed in search then the simple best solution is to set up 301 reditects in your .htaccess file (apache server). To do this see this post

If you use 301 redirects on your old domain (assuming the web pages are still hosted) you can redirect to your new domain, and land on the exact page you intend. Next time a searchbot crawls your old domain the robot will also crawl the redirect links and index pages from both sites.

From the search engines point of view both the old and new documents are valid. This is usefull: if you get an organic search result for the old domain you'll probably get one for the new domain too - a double listing in SERPs.

A word of caution - do not abuse 301 redirects. Searchbots are smart and will degrade your rankings due to misuse of 301 and 302 redirects.

To make this point really clear I created a website in 1991 called 'Alchemy of Africa'. If you search it in Google is appears at number 1. In those days we did not use 301 redirects. I lost the domain name years ago but there are still 133 direct results in Google (if you search it in "quotes") for that site - 15 years later!


This post has been edited by klikhir: Mar 8 2007, 05:17 AM

[storyspinner]

I'd have to agree - the 301 redirect is going to be your best route. If you are moving the entire domain over to the co.uk.

If most of your business is in the UK then this definitely makes sense.

The 301 is going to pass over everything, but as backgammon said, you might see a temporary drop in PR (if that matters to you - some don't care), but generally it comes back within a 1-3 month timespan.

[lee.n3o]

I had a similar problem - Although my pages were ASP so I came up with the below

http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/inde...showtopic=47328

[Tom Anthony]

It'd be interesting to hear Ammon on why he suggested focusing on the .com domain, when the site was UK oriented.

I have a site which is aimed primarily at people in the UK, and have a .co.uk and .com for the site. Initially, for about 6 months, I used the .co.uk and pointed the .com domain over at the .co.uk.

However, discussing it on the phone with Eric Ward, he suggested I swap it to use the .com as the primary. About 6 months later the site is ranking better, but there are so many other factors involved I wouldn't suggest it was because of that, but it may have helped.

On the PPC campaign for the site (geotargetted to UK), I found higher click through rates if I display the .co.uk domain, but it actually goes to the .com.

[A.N.Onym]

Ah, the tld probably doesn't matter, if you host the domain in the UK and have links from co.uk/UK hosted websites and the .com domain is shown in "all the web" results. In which case, the .com domain might be more preferable. Unless you aim for specifically UK-specific results.

I guess only experience can tell here.

This post has been edited by A.N.Onym: Mar 8 2007, 01:28 PM

[xyZed]

It'd be interesting to hear Ammon on why he suggested focusing on the .com domain, when the site was UK oriented. Maybe he thought the age bonus was better than the .tld domain?

I think it was because my site was already established and doing extremely well in Google with the .com extension. By pointing the newer .co.uk dame at it, I had the best of both worlds. However, now I have a new hosting package that lets me put all the pages physically at the .co.uk site and point the .com at it I think it's something I should do.

To me, I can't see how it would do anything but make things better, after all the current situation is that every internal link on my site is a co.uk one so presumably when clicked the browser has to look up the URL and find out that it's redirected to the .com version.

I'm just looking for reassurance because A: the .com version is 2 and a half years older and B: Changing anything as big as this could have unforseen consequences.

Does anyone have the thought that because the .com and .co.uk have always been inextricably linked then Google wouldn't mind where the files physically were? My gut feeling is that my site should be hosted on a .co.uk hosting which means all my internal links don't have to be redirected and it will be a 100% UK site. I'm just afraid it could have disastrous consequences somehow.

BTW. I definitely need to change hosting companies anyway. it's just whether I replicate the current situation or use the opportunity to swap them round or not.

This post has been edited by xyZed: Mar 9 2007, 04:35 AM

[A.N.Onym]

Okay.

It seems that you have two sites with the same content, while .com now links to the co.uk pages.

I guess it should be better for you to have only one version of the site and redirect all the pages from one domain to the relevant pages of the other domain.

Now, I don't think we should try to cheat the SEs by pointing at the aged domain. Instead, going with the common sense and redirecting the links and pages to the co.uk domain seems to be the most viable option.

However, you need to remember to have the .com website up (while redirected to the co.uk domain), so that it'd get redirected properly.

I have to stress once again, there needs to be one version of a page (be it an internal page or a homepage) of your business. Once you choose the location (the co.uk domain, I presume), then you redirect the .com domain to the co.uk domain (even the homepage).

[xyZed]

It seems that you have two sites with the same content, while .com now links to the co.uk pages.

I guess it should be better for you to have only one version of the site and redirect all the pages from one domain to the relevant pages of the other domain.

Thanks, but I'm not following you here. I do only have one site, the .com site, which is where all pages are uploaded. It's the .co.uk pages that are directed to the .com. There's no duplicate content that I know of - unless having the parked domain means the content is somehow duplicated.

I must admit I'm not sure how it all works. All I know is that if you type in a URl from my site using the .com extension then you go directly to the page that's uploaded there - but if you type the same URL but with a .co.uk it gets redirected (because the .co.uk domain is parked and pointing to the .com site) to the exact same page but the url showing in the address bar is .co.uk.

Are you saying that parking a domain and pointing it to another is achieved by duplicating the entire site?

This post has been edited by xyZed: Mar 9 2007, 05:56 AM

[A.N.Onym]

When a visitor goes to .com, he stays there. However, all links from the homepage lead to the co.uk domain.

When a visitor goes to co.uk, he stays there. Links, naturally, lead to co.uk.

Thus, to only direct visitors to one page, you need to redirect the homepage of .com to co.uk to finish the redirection process. If there are any pages of the .com domain, you need to redirect them to the .co.uk domain.

In this situation, it doesn't matter much where the .com domain is or was hosted.

I am not sure why you need to have co.uk parked and shown at the same time. It'd make sense to host files with the co.uk doman in the UK.

This post has been edited by A.N.Onym: Mar 9 2007, 07:21 AM

[xyZed]

When a visitor goes to .com, he stays there. However, all links from the homepage lead to the co.uk domain. When a visitor goes to co.uk, he stays there. Links, naturally, lead to co.uk.

I could be seriously misunderstanding how this all works. My understanding is that when a visitor goes to .com he is served the actual page that's hosted there, however, as all subsequent links are absolute links using the .co.uk tld - each time they click a link, they get redirected to the page on hosted at .com although their address bar still shows the .co.uk extension.

If a visitor types in or clicks a link using the .co.uk he stays there all the time because all links are absolute using the .co.uk tld - but - as the .co.uk domain name is only pointing to the .com site doesn't each link get redirected to the real pages hosted at .com?

This post has been edited by xyZed: Mar 9 2007, 07:05 AM

[A.N.Onym]

Your co.uk domain isn't linking to .com.

Domain names and physical locations are not connected, because physical file locations and URL redirection are different. You can host .com in UK and co.uk in US, generally, but you do need to host co.uk in the UK.

301 redirect, the redirection we are talking about, happens automatically. So, you need to setup a 301 redirect from the .com homepage to the co.uk homepage for visitors to automatically go to the co.uk website.

I don't know how you ended up at your current hosting/redirect situation, but it looks messed up, as if someone tried to play tricks with the SEs.

This post has been edited by A.N.Onym: Mar 9 2007, 07:29 AM

[Ron Carnell]

I think your confusion is common and revolves around the difference between a redirect and an alias.

Ron is an alias for Ronald, and both are aliases for Carnell. If someone comes up to me at a party and addresses me by any of those names, I'm going to respond. He's got the right person. On the other hand, if he comes up to me and calls me Frank, I'm going to point across the room and send him over to Frank. He doesn't have the right person, and he literally has to walk away from me to get to the right person.

If you go to an URL, either by clicking a link or typing one in, and it immediately changes to another URL, that's a redirect. You just got sent over to talk to Frank. If the URL in your browser never changes, that might be an alias. You're still talking to Ron, Ronald, or Carnell. The thing about an alias, though, is that's it's pretty much transparent. You can't really tell how many different names I'll respond to, and you can't really tell which I might prefer to be called.

There's a technical side to this that is important, too.

When you come up to me at that party, imagine that I hand you my business card. If you call me by any of the aliases I recognize, that card has a big 200 printed on it. The 200 is called a response code and is sent to a browser (or spider) any time they request a valid page. The 200 response code means OK and is the flip side to the well known 404 response code, which means Not Found.

If you come up to me and call me Frank, however, the card I hand you is going to have a different number on it, usually a 301 (permanent redirect) or 302 (temporary redirect). When you get across the room, Frank is going to hand you his own 200 card. This is important stuff because those response codes tell the browser (or spider!) what is happening.

There are a ton of tools on the Internet that let you check which response code a page is returning. Run a Google search for page headers tools and pick one you like. Running your page through one of these tools will show you the Response code being returned.

The trouble with aliases is that they usually lead to duplicate content. If you come up to me once and call me Ron, then come up to me later and call me Carnell, and if I hand you a 200 card each time, you really don't know what I want to be called. Chances are, you'll just pick one at random, and since my luck always sucks, it'll probably not be the one I like best. It's the same with the search engines. If you have two domains returning the same content and both are giving a 200 code, the SE has no idea which you would prefer to be listed . . . and it really doesn't want to list both. So, it'll pick one for you. I hope your luck is better than mine.

If I 301 you over to Frank, you'll know next time not to call me Frank. He's Frank, I'm Ron. Frank will get indexed, Ron will be ignored.

Similarly, to make a closer analogy, if you walk up and call me Carnell, I can still hand you a 301 card to Ron. It's the equivalent of telling you to call me Ron. We're buddies, right? You're still talking to the same person (an alias), but the 301 response tells you which I prefer.

It's really not much more complicated than that. You have to decide which domain you want indexed (and there are advantages to both), and then make sure the other domain is sending a 301 redirect. Your new host is probably going to configure an alias, because that's easiest for him, so you need to make sure he understands the difference. You want a redirect, not an alias.

Which redirect you want is still up in the air.

Warning! Assuming you already have a 301 in place, if you change what you have right now, you should have a REALLY good reason for it, because that change will not be without cost. It will take time, usually a few months at least, for the search engines to readjust to what are essentially new instructions on what you want. Eventually, they'll get it right again, but your rankings will very likely suffer during the transition. Sometimes, that cost simply has to be paid, but it's not something that should be done lightly.

[storyspinner]

xyZed...
A.N.Onym's right, there's something funky up here.

I looked at your site too, and even changed out the "co.uk" on some of your pages for ".com" and the pages still come up with .com. So, for some reasons, you literally do have two sites. One on .com and one on .co.uk.

Both seem to have the same page rank though.

I'd question your host on this. For some reason they are duplicating the site.

[A.N.Onym]

Ron, thanks for an extensively elaborate explanation of the matter

This post has been edited by A.N.Onym: Mar 9 2007, 08:24 AM