Why Attorneys Should Never Lose Or Change Domains Names

One thing we have here at DUIAttorneyTab.com is a lot of data on attorney practices from around the country. And one thing we’re noticing over the years is how many attorney websites go offline.

This isn’t good for your practice.

Having a consistent web presence is important for two things:

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)
2. Building trust with potential clients

When potential clients find you somewhere on the web (wether a directory like this one or an old social media profile), and clickthrough to a website that’s no longer up…something doesn’t sit well with that person.

Eeew… I don’t like the look of that!

Now, it could be you simply changed your domain name or you joined another firm. In this article we’re going go over why it’s a good idea to keep those old domain names and websites up!

A long, consistent history in the search engines is a GOOD thing

Generally, the longer your domain says online (and without service interruptions), the better you’ll do in the search engines. Websites that stay up for years build trust in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

If a search engine can count on always finding your content in their index, then that’s a great reason to keep sending search engine users to it. Also, the longer your content stays up, the more likely it is to get to linked to from other websites – another search engine boost.

Here are some other tips to help you make the most of your old content:

• Don’t be afraid to add to old webpages or update them. Updating content regularly keeps the search engines coming back. It also keeps your content from getting stale or outdated.
• Look at your top performing content to create new variations. Perhaps you created articles that can be expanded on by creating similar topics from them. Think of frequently asked questions and come up with variations of similar and related questions.

Your Old Website Content Is Gold

Old content is gold. It’s ages like wine.

Like we said in the previous section – old content get more links over time, and continue to attract traffic for years to come. One article published today can bring in a consistent stream of people to your site as long as it’s up.

And to be extra clear, old content consists of:

• Webpages (we specifically mean URLs, e.g.www.mywebsite.com/what-to-do-if-you-get-a-dui)
• Images and Infographics
• PDFs
• Videos (if self hosted)

So whatever you do, try not to:

• Delete webpages
• Move webpages
• Change your URLs
• Change your domain name
• Let your domain name OR web hosting expire
• Delete or move images, PDFs or infographics

If you must move webpages, be sure to hire a professional web developer skilled in SEO to handle the transition. They can implement search engine friendly redirects to make sure the content is moved without hurting your SEO performance.

IMPORTANT: If you’re moving to an entirely new domain name, then you will probably want to keep the old domain continually hosted so that the redirects can continue to work.

Tip: Use PayPal to Pay for Your Web Hosting and Domain Names

Most (probably all) web hosting and domain name registrars allow for automatic payment renewal. You can obviously put this on a credit card, but when your credit card expires, many people don’t see the email from the hosting/registrar company or just get too busy to deal with it. Especially if they’re an attorney.

Then your site goes down.

Google comes back to re-index your site and sees that it’s no longer up and drops all your webpages from the index. Ugh.

If you use PayPal, the domain names and web hosting can be billed every year with less chance of service interruptions. Regardless if your credit card on file expires, your PayPal account can still be charged and the likelihood of an email from PayPal reaching you is higher.

So Keep Your Website Up!

It’s probably a good idea to login to your web hosting and domain name registrar right now to make sure your properties are not about to expire. Update your credit card info or see if you can switch to paying with PayPal.