I'm selling a site in a rather highly priced acquisition deal and will be putting the domain in Escrow for a 1 year period while the buyer makes payments. I don't like the fact that the whois information would change to the Escrow company for a year and then to the buyer after the year period as I find it to be an unnecessary risk from an SEO perspective. I'm looking to not rock the boat and provide a seamless transaction from start to finish and feel the multiple whois changes might rub Google the wrong way, which may or may not have an affect on organic rankings. I've considered the option of handing over my entire registrar/hosting account logins instead of having the whois change 2X in 1 year to keep things the way they are. This is a rather significant purchase price. There will be something in the contract that specifies the payment schedule may change if traffic decreases, which is why I'm being overly cautious with anything that could disturb that. Do you find this to be a risk and how would you handle this? Thanks!
Hi,
Changing the whois information frequently over a short period of time should have no or very impact on organic visibility.
Domain factors that can have an impact on organic performance are:
- Having a domain registered for a longer period often provides more trust with search engines. So having it registered for 5 years in often a good thing to do
- Having a specific country focused TLD for the search engine country you are targeting (this has diminished recently a little)
- Hosting the domain in the country you are targeting in the search engines (this has also diminished a little recently)
- Having security issues on your domain, such as having your website hacked.
- Selling domains to target a completely different region or country in the search engine can provide some drawback's sometimes as the existing backlinks can often be focused on the old country that the domain was focused on
- Similar to the last point, if you are selling a domain to someone who plans to use it to target a different industry can slow organic performance progress of a new site.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
Lloyd
Answered 8 years ago
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