[State-of-the-Art]

Hi folks,

Can you help me with this dilema?

I have set up a website under a domain name as below;

[A] www.keywordkeywordkeyword.co.uk

The site has been live for about 3-4months

Shortly after buying the first domain, I also bought;

[B] www.keyword-keyword-keyword.co.uk

Which is currently set to forward to the first domain.

I am trying to improve SERPs performance, and i thought [B] might do better for 'search' as there would be less potential confusion over the keywords. So i plan to move the site to [B] and set up a domain forward to it from [A].

I have also built some new pages which i would put in place of the old ones when i moved the site across which have better SEO'd urls.

I have two questions,

1. Is this a good idea?
2. If so what is the best way to re-direct from [A] to [B] and not lose the links to the old domain (and not lose and SERPs performance)?

You help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[rallport]

1: Seems a bit pointless and I'd be very surprised if you noticed any difference at all E.g. google web design and see results 1 and 3. Good can determine webdesign as two seperate words.

2: To redirect from one domain to another use a 301 redirect. Just google this for a how to, but the standard way is a 301 via a htcess file. You should also add individual rules to 301 you old pages urls to new ones.

[State-of-the-Art]

Thanks for your comment.

Another reason I am considering this change is to go from a plural version of the keywords to a singular as my research has shown higher search for the singular forms.

I believed when I sent up the website that Google and other SE's didn't differentiate between singular and plural, so I went for the plural version (as it made more sense as a company name grammatically), but since going live I’ve found that Google obviously does differentiate based on my 'Webmaster Tools' results and I’d prefer to try to optimise for the singular form (which makes more sense as a search phrase).

Would this make the change more worth while?

What doe people think?

Thanks.

[SEOSheffield]

I think you're concentrating on the wrong thing here. Google does lend a lot of weight to the keywords contained within your URL. However, there are other factors involved such as content and inbound links that are ultimately more important than which domain name you use. If you're 301-ing your other domain names anyway, it really shouldn't matter which one you use as your primary.

Using dashes can help avoid confusion over keywords, although Google and other major search engines are pretty good at separating words in domain names.

[State-of-the-Art]

I appreciate your comment, obviously this is not all I am focusing on regarding SEO and content and links will be my major focus. I just want to get this bit optimised as best I can.

I own the various versions of the keyword filled domain names (with and without dashes, plural and singular) and since going live on my first choice of domain (plural without dashes), I’ve become aware that there could be some search engine confusion over the keywords without the dashes and also that the singular version gets more hits.

I just thought that this would be a simple changeover to make that would make some improvement to the SERPs performance.

Am I barking up the wrong tree?

[Gareth Daine]

Hi,

If you've changed the content on the original domain dramatically, then the 301 won't make much difference as you'll be re-indexed based on your content changes and this may hurt your rankings if Google decides the older content was more relevant.

Having hyphens separate the keywords is only any use for search engines that can't differentiate between keywords or when two words together produces other words not related, Google can differentiate between keywords.

Incoming links from high PR, relevant websites is probably the biggest factor in getting ranked. Although, I have had completely blank websites rank in position 1 to 3 in Google based on their keyword rich URL's.

But again, relevant, quality content is a big one. Even if you managed to rank number one through backlinking and domain name, if your content was not relevant it would be pretty much pointless.

Hope this helps.

[rallport]

To illustrate your dilema. Google 'web design' - http://www.google.co...59b761b84e2996a and look at the domains in top positions

[Sinero Web Design]

Google would see this as : ( keyword-keyword-keyword = keyword ) you would of been better buying keyword-seo-tips or something...