Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
SEO Value in Switching to ".NYC" Domain?
-
Recently " .NYC" domains have become available for purchase to New York City based businesses.
I own and operate a New York City commercial real estate firm, nyc-officespace-leader.com. New domain would be www.metro-manhattan.nyc
Our existing domain has been in use for seven years.would there be an SEO benefit to transferring our site to .NYC domain? Or would a new domain kill our domain rank?
Thanks, Alan
-
Hi All:)
Popping back in here with a little proviso. While I think The Sage's suggestion is creative, I would strongly stipulate that if you do choose to go with a multi-domain approach, your NAP (name, address, phone) must reside on only one of the two websites. And do not use the second domain in any of your citation building. You do not want Google getting mixed up finding the same basic contact details on two different websites - it can create a nightmare of merged and duplicate listings, negatively impacting the clarity of your citations and the ranking power they provide. As you can tell, I'm not a big fan of multi-site approaches for local businesses in most cases, because of these risks, and if you do decide to go with this route, do be careful to run the second site as a completely separate entity that does not share basic NAP with the main, local site. Hope this advice is helpful!
-
As a real estate brokerage firm our business is local in nature. If we can get improved ranking for such terms as "New York City office space" it would help our business immensely.
Your suggestion of using both .com and .NYC is very good.
Thanks,
Alan -
I ran your existing site through the Moz platform here and discovered a domain authority of 24 for your existing domain. While this isn't awful, it's not so great that you'd want to hold on to it with an ironclad grip. Remember -- throwing good money after bad is a sure sign of a big loser.
Ultimately, no one here knows what Google will do in the next couple of years with regard to the new TLDs. Some will argue that they will be treated like .info domains and penalized in search results, as they aren't considered "premium Web real estate." I personally agree with the camp that thinks that as Google attempts to deliver more relevant traffic, having your location (or your primary topic) in your TLD can only be a good thing.
But there's no reason you can't have both. You can use your existing .com to promote your corporate identity, as it does now, and utilize your new .NYC domain name to deliver content that is targeted and relevant to NYC locals, for example, neighborhood-based content. This was the same recommendation we made to our client at Keller Williams NYC. I'm posting the same advice here because I'd like to see it become the new "best practice," because to me, it certainly makes the most sense.
-
Hi Alan!
I'm with Egol on this - if you're going to go to the trouble of changing to a new domain (and all of the redirect, branding and citation cleanup this would involve) I would only suggest doing so for a better domain than the one you're mentioning. Other community members may have differing opinions on this, but the hyphenated domain doesn't strike me as strong enough to make all the work involved in switching domains seem like a good tradeoff.
-
Right now you have a problem with your best clients typing in NYCOfficeSpaceLeader.com or NYC-Office-Space-Leader.com or NYC_Office_Space_Leader.com (and a host of typos).
If you go to the proposed domain your best clients will be typing... MetroManhatten.nyc and MetroManhatten.com and Metro-Manhatten.com.
Those domains, to me, are like throwing traffic away.
Phone conversations go like this...
Guy: What's your website?
You: Metro hypen Manhattan.NYC
Guy: Huh? MetroHikingManhattan.com?
You: No. M-E-T-R-O hyphen-like-a-minus-sign M-A-N-H-A-T-T-A-N dot com
Guy: huh? can you repeat that ?
You: OMG!
Guy: OMG!
I would make the name of my biz really simple. Get a good .com domain without hypens. I'd be willing to spend good money to get an appropriate domain that anybody will clearly understand on a telephone. If you don't get a .com then whoever owns the .com is going to get lots of your type-in traffic.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should Multi Location Businesses "Local Content Silo" Their Services Pages?
I manage a site for a medical practice that has two locations. We already have a location page for each office location and we have the NAP for both locations in the footer of every page. I'm considering making a change to the structure of the site to help it rank better for individual services at each of the two locations, which I think will help pages rank in their specific locales by having the city name in the URL. However, I'm concerned about diluting the domain authority that gets passed to the pages by moving them deeper in the site's structure. For instance, the services URLs are currently structured like this: www.domain.com/services/teeth-whitening (where the service is offered in each of the two locations) Would it make sense to move to a structure more like www.domain.com/city1name/teeth-whitening www.domain.com/city2name/teeth-whitening Does anyone have insight from dealing with multi-location brands on the best way to go about this?
Local Website Optimization | | formandfunctionagency1 -
SEO and Main Navigation Best Practices
I've read a number of articles on SEO and main navigation for websites. I'd like to get a solid answer/recommendation to help solve this one. This is the situation. We're helping a local business that offers pest control and property maintenance services. Under each of these, there area a number of services available, eg, cockroach control, termite inspections or lawn mowing services, rubbish removal and so on. Is it best to have a main nav containing the top keywords for the services - Pest Control | Property Maintenance, with a drop down to the services under each. Or, a simple approach - Our Services > drop down to each - Pest Control > Termite Inspections, etc. My concern here is that they have quite a lot of services, so the nav could be way too long. Really appreciate any assistance here. Many thanks.
Local Website Optimization | | RichardRColeman0 -
Should I open a new domain and website for a new location under one company?
Hi my name is Gina and I wanted to ask for some advice. I'm thinking opening a diff location and was thinking if its a good idea to open up a new domain and new website? And why that may be a good idea and why or a bad idea and why?
Local Website Optimization | | LittleDog0 -
Improving SEO with no blog
I have a client who understands the value of content for SEO - however getting them to provide some content has proven an impossible task. I've tried every way to make it easy for them. I've offered to come over to their office myself and see if I can just take 15 minutes of their time and record their answers to a few questions. The response is that's a great idea, we'll set up a time...and no time is ever good. So I've thought, what can I do without them? Unfortunately, their industry is so technical and so niche I'd need to have a law degree to even begin to understand exactly what they do, and as they are in law it's probably better to have no content than content with something even slightly incorrect in it. For now, all I can do is summarize and share news from a government website to their social media accounts. It's not highly effective. Their on-page SEO for the main site is completely optimized. I've placed them in every free listing I can possibly find - both industry and local sites. I have them update me on any local events, conferences and/or trade shows they attend for possible backlinks. What else can I do? I suppose I fear that if I can't provide them any additional results, they will stop seeing the value in SEO services, and I'd have a hard time disagreeing as I can't think of what else to do for them. Thanks for any help!
Local Website Optimization | | everestagency1 -
Call Tracking, DNI Script & Local SEO
Hi Moz! I've been reading about this a lot more lately - and it doesn't seem like there's exactly a method that Google (or other search engines) would consider to be "best practices". The closest I've come to getting some clarity are these Blumenthals articles - http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/05/14/a-guide-to-call-tracking-and-local/ & the follow-up piece from CallRail - http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/11/25/guide-to-using-call-tracking-for-local-search/. Assuming a similar goal of using an existing phone number with a solid foundation in the local search ecosystem, and to create the ability to track how many calls are coming organically (not PPC or other paid platform) to the business directly from the website for an average SMB. For now, let's also assume we're also not interested in screening the calls, or evaluating customer interaction with the staff - I would love to hear from anyone who has implemented the DNI call tracking info for a website. Were there negative effects on Local SEO? Did the value of the information (# of calls/month) outweigh any local search conflicts? If I was deploying this today, it seems like the blueprint for including DNI script, while mitigating risk for losing local search visibility might go something like this: Hire reputable call-tracking service, ensure DNI will match geographic area-code & be "clean" numbers Insert DNI script on key pages on site Maintain original phone number (non-DNI) on footer, within Schema & on Contact page of the site ?? Profit Ok, those last 2 bullet points aren't as important, but I would be curious where other marketers land on this issue, as I think there's not a general consensus at this point. Thanks everyone!
Local Website Optimization | | Etna1 -
Image URLs changed 3 times after using a CDN - How to Handle for SEO?
Hi Mozzers,
Local Website Optimization | | emerald
Hoping for your advice on how to handle the SEO effects an image URL change, that changed 3 times, during the course of setting up a CDN over a month period, as follows: (URL 1) - Original image URL before CDN:www.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg (URL 2) - First CDN URL (without CNAME alias - using WPEngine & their own CDN):
username.net-dns.com/images/abc.jpg (URL 3) - Second CDN URL (with CNAME alias - applied 3 weeks later):
cdn.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg When we changed to URL 2, our image rankings in the Moz Tool Pro Rankings dropped from 80% to 5% (the one with the little photo icons). So my questions for recovery are: Do I need to add a 301 redirect/Canonical tag from the old image URL 1 & 2 to URL 3 or something else? Do I need to change my image sitemap to use cdn.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg instead of www.? Thanks in advance for your advice.0 -
Expert Advice Needed: Single Domain vs Multiple Domain for 2 Different Countries?
Hi MOZers, We are looking for some advice on whether to have a single TLD(.com) or 2 separate domains (.ca) & (.com) Our website will have different products & pricing for each of US users(.com) and Canada users(.ca). Since, we are targeting different countries & user groups with each domain - we are not concerned about "duplicate content". So, does it make more sense to have a single domain for compounding our content marketing efforts? Or, Will it be more beneficial to have seperate domains for the geo-targeting benefits on Google.CA & Google.COM? Looking forward to some great suggestions.
Local Website Optimization | | ScorePromotions0 -
Is translating my SEO meta data to new languages worthwhile?
When translating a website to additional languages, is it recommended, for Google SEO purposes, that the keywords, re-written URLs, meta titles and meta descriptions of each page be translated as well; or have those elements been completely depreciated?
Local Website Optimization | | sptechnologies0