Google: Keep your URLs “for the long run”
Should you change your website’s URL? Will it damage your SEO to switch out the unique address of your website? Google has tacitly confirmed that keeping the same URL for as long as possible is the best way to protect your SEO growth.
Google’s John Mueller has stated that, for SEO purposes, webmasters should maintain the URL they started with for as long as they possibly can:
I'd really recommend keeping the same URLs for the long run.
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) July 22, 2019
Your URL is quite literally the address of your business on the internet and changing said address is a decision that should never come lightly. If you change your business too often in real life, people will have a harder time finding you, your existing customers will be disrupted, and you’ll lose some of the authority you built in that location.
The effects of changing your URL are quite similar; links pointing to your domain will no longer work unless you set up proper redirects. This means that all of the beneficial link authority you have built for your old URL is at risk and requires extra work for you to move to your new site address.
A business will often change its URL when it goes through rebranding or loses a naming dispute with a competitor. While sometimes a URL change is unavoidable, Google has made clear that sticking with your original web address is the superior choice when it comes to protecting and boosting your SEO gains.
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