from .net to .com

[rotpar]

Hi all,

I am thinking to move my forum.net to forum.com since I could buy the domain name as .com lately. Question is, does it make sense overall? I just prefer .com over .net but what does it mean for SEO? The forum.net is about 8 years old. Does that change make sense and if so, is there a way to not harm my SEO overall?

Thank you

 

[Mr Lucky]

I think it’s more about marketing than seo.

I think redirects lose such a teeny tiny bit these days that if you really want the .com there is no real issue.

If it was me I would stick with the .net but sit on the .com

 

[gerryvz]

OR use both at the same time, and have one redirect to the other. This is what I do.

 

[rotpar]

OR use both at the same time, and have one redirect to the other. This is what I do.

How did you do that? So do you mean you can use for example forum.com/thread/post/title at the same time with forum.net/thread/post/title ?

 

[iCafe]

to redirect .net to .com use .htaccess

 

[gerryvz]

Correct. My forum has the old (vBulletin, pre migration) domain 500eboard.com and the new (XenForo) domain 500eboard.co

Redirects are done using a domain-level redirect (I have my domains parked at Google Domains), so anyone going to 500eboard.com is automatically routed to 500eboard.co

Individual thread URL redirects from the old forum (for example links to my old forum posted on other sites) are handled via XenForo redirects. Once set up, it never needs to change. And properly configured, it works seamlessly.

For something like you are doing, @iCafe is right -- probably best accomplished with .htaccess

Google will catch up / adjust over time as it indexes the new site, and follows redirects. I don't think in the mid to long term your SEO will take a hit. I'd say it took the better part of a year, if not a full year, for Google to crawl my new migrated XenForo site enough to really index it well. My forum is fairly small -- about 14,000 threads, 9,000 members and 200,000+ posts.

 

[Mr Lucky]

OR use both at the same time, and have one redirect to the other. This is what I do.

I do this with one of my sites, but basically the one that is redirected ceases to exist apart from the fact that you still own the domain.

So say you redirected example.net to example.com, in this case would you not change the xenforo board settings to show example.com as board URL (and canonical if you want). hence example.net will fall off of google and only remain as inbound links from other sites that were made before the change.

Whether it's worth it from .net to .com I think is moot. In my case I switched from .co.uk to .com and to me that made sense in regard to hopefully getting indexed more globally.

 

[gerryvz]

I do this with one of my sites, but basically the one that is redirected ceases to exist apart from the fact that you still own the domain.

So say you redirected example.net to example.com, in this case would you not change the xenforo board settings to show example.com as board URL (and canonical if you want). hence example.net will fall off of google and only remain as inbound links from other sites that were made before the change.

Whether it's worth it from .net to .com I think is moot. In my case I switched from .co.uk to .com and to me that made sense in regard to hopefully getting indexed more globally.

Nicely put. Thank you !

 

[rotpar]

Thanks guys that really helped a lot