VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[Mike Harrison]

Various iterations of my website have been online for about 20 years. Almost exactly 10 years ago, I switched to a new (my current) domain and, since that time, I've bought several other related domains that forward to the currently active domain.

What I'd now like to do is switch domains; make one of those forwarding domains the active domain, and have the current active domain forward to the new active domain.

Has anyone here done this before, and do you know what kind of impact this might have on my site's consistently fairly good Google rankings?
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Mike
Male Voice Over Talent
I have taken leave of my sensors.

[ConnieTerwilliger]

I don't really know the SEO answer, but if the new primary domain includes a common search word, then maybe it will get hits because of that?

I know that I have been online with voiceover-talent.com since 1996 and it does seem pretty well entrenched.

Oh, by the way, 3 .com domains are expiring tomorrow if anyone wants to try to grab them.

narrationvoiceover.com
narrationvo.com
corporatevo.com
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Playing for a living...
www.voiceover-talent.com
YouTube Channel: http://youtube.com/connieterwilliger

[Deirdre]

Do you have a way of tracking how your traffic reaches you? If all your domains are pointing to your primary domain name, you're still getting the benefit of that particular domain name's search-find power.

Changing to a new name should be transparent because your current primary name will point to the new one.

The TITLE is part of what Google seems to like.
What shows in the Google display is your site description. Used to be you'd register that stuff on DMOZ,

I don't have any idea anymore if your site's domain name has anything to do with the way people find you. For years, if you put

American Female Voice Talent

into Google, I was one of the first 3 hits. That's the Title of my site. Now, I only show up on the first page if you put "American Female Voice Talent" in quotes.
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DBCooperVO.com
IMDB

[jim edgar]

SEO/Google Rankings really shifted a couple of years ago. At that time, Google made some more major shifts in their algorithms, focusing on useful content and traffic to that content. It was a deliberate effort to make SEO gaming strategies (the ones folks try to charge you for to be in the top search results) less effective. in fact, it's really put the kabosh on the effectiveness of that older methodology.

Google is also attempting to focus on "localization" - so that if you are on an errand and type in "Ribbon Mic Repair", it will attempt to find all of those facilities nearby your physical location and weight the returns in that direction. This is stronger in the mobile search (which as you would think has become more of the way most people search).

Best case (in general) for having your website show up in a general search (as opposed to your name/nearly your name + VO) is to have significant content on your site, which is linked to by a wide variety of real people, as well as positive reviews. Makes it harder to game, of course, but has started to weed out the chaff. You do need good practices as far as title/metadata/description to be sure. Optimizing the normal code snippets for google analytics, etc.

(All of this is ignoring targeted adword buys...)

But, as far as moving your domain - there shouldn't be more than a week of lull. Might even boost you. Last year, I moved a large (non-vo) non-profit site to a new host, removing about 85% of its outdated archival material (all html) and rebuilding in a Wordpress backbone. It's more present in results now that it was before. They publish new content every other week and push it out via the normal social channels.
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JimEdgarVoices.com | JustAskJimVO.studio | Source-Connect: jimedgarvoices

[cjringwall]

I've been a webmaster since 1997, here are my tips:

I have done this several times, it's never good for search position to replace an established 'aged' domain with an newer one, even if you 301 redirect. You may disappear for a time, and you may never get back to exactly where you were.

But if you are re-branding and want to change, you can likely SEO your way back in time with proper content, url structure, on-page SEO factors. Also, despite many experts warnings to the contrary, inbound links still do help. It's better to get links from other contextually relevant domains, like other VO sites, etc. Just be sure the links are from quality sites and are built slowly- don't hire any link building services to do this- do it yourself. Ten or so links from quality sites will put you miles ahead.

I would place VO keyword competition in the moderate category, not impossible to rank- but not as easy as just throwing a page out there. In our keyword realm Google seems to still like older domains, trusts them more to be relevant, other things being equal.

The problem for most VO sites is that they don't have much in the way of textual content, so it's hard for Google's robot to determine what the site is about. A half dozen or so 500 word blog posts that deftly use your desired keywords can really help get discovered and trusted by G. Also, using Google's Webmaster Tools (now called Search Console) can really help get your pages indexed. Submitting a sitemap is easy with this tool.

Install analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. Is it from links on other sites? Google Searches? Or are people just hitting you direct from bookmarks? That will help you decide how much effort to put into SEO.

Finally - If you have a new domain, convert it to https:// from http:// now. Some call this SSL or if you are a nerd, TLS. Google has stated that https: will give you a bit of a bump in the search results. Also, it won't be long before SSL will be a requirement. Google's Chrome browser already tags non-https:// sites as 'Insecure' now- pretty soon I'm betting they will start displaying a warning page before proceeding to your non https: site.

Everyone will eventually have to deal with the SSL issue. You'll need an SSL certificate- a cheap one from Commodo will do. Most web hosts have a decent process for this now, and their support can handle it for you. Once your certificate is installed, you can use Really Simple SSL in Wordpress to automatically redirect your users. Also remember to update your sitemap and your site url in Google search console with your https:// domain.

My domain is brand new, so it's buried deep in the search results. I'm working on blog content and will just have to wait for G to find me and determine where I belong in the rankings. It takes time, months to a year to see results, so it's a long haul process.

HTH!
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C. J. Ringwall