On 20:41:56 27 January 2008 goateresque wrote:

 Our company is rebranding and there is a feeling that we should change our main web url from www.thismanyletters.com to www.thenewthismanyletter.com .

Now my feeling is that the shorter the url the better in terms of click through rate and retention however I don't have any actual stats to back this up and I'll need these to win the argument.

Can anyone help me to move this from a subjective discusssion to one with facts?

Thanks

I would go for the short option, if you need to run both sites in tandem, you could add a link from your new hompage to "visit the old site" or instead of using the "newthismanyletters" url, put the new site on the existing url and call the old one "oldthismanyletters" url.

In my experience the longer the url the less likely people are to remember it and unless you undertake paid search around miss-spellings or have good organic search engine rankings, you may begin to lose traffic.

Hi

here are a couple of case examples that may assist your cause...

http://www.ezau.com/latest/articles/0155.shtml

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm

Generally the URL length will affect both your brand memory and ultimately affecting traffic stats - i.e.  the less memorable the URL the less likely people will visit and thus a chain reaction will follow through to your own brand and site SEO.

If you do go ahead with changing the URL - try setting up a redirect from the original one and monitor your referal rates over time - you may see that the original brand is this most popular.

Regards

On 10:01:59 28 January 2008 scavangerjohn wrote:

On 20:41:56 27 January 2008 goateresque wrote:

 Our company is rebranding and there is a feeling that we should change our main web url from www.thismanyletters.com to www.thenewthismanyletter.com .

Now my feeling is that the shorter the url the better in terms of click through rate and retention however I don't have any actual stats to back this up and I'll need these to win the argument.

Can anyone help me to move this from a subjective discusssion to one with facts?

Thanks

I would tend to agree with ThomasCasill. The length of the domain name on its own matters far less than the domain name itself, and how relevant it is to your website - i.e. probably either your company name, or something to do with your products or services. As long as the domain name doesn't exceed maybe 15-20 characters, or contain crazy amounts of dashes I think you should be fine. Choosing a name which is relevant and/or memorable and/or relevant is more important.

Other important things you need to consider:

- impact of changing domain name on your current ranking. A new URL will take time to get back into Google and you need to make sure you get the redirects from old to new set up right (i.e. 301 and 404 rather than 302). Also you need to make sure you put the effort in promoting the new URL and updating all the appropriate links in, etc.

- keeping the entire URL simple is perhaps just as important as the domain itself. As long as the site is structured well and using a good CMS (if appropriate) you should have no problems choosing www.mywebsite.com/products/bananas/ rather than www.mywebsite.com/products_page.asp?productid=123xyz&color=yellow&shape=curvy. The first will look better in Google, be easier to type directly and also gives you the opportunity to include search terms in your URL.

- avoid duplicate content. It's not good to have two domains with the same content, so I think it's best to avoid having both your old and new sites live with the same content. Choose a primary domain and stick to it, then redirect appropriately (or configure DNS?) to avoid the risk of being penalised for duplicate content.

If I can find any hard facts to back this up, particularly relating to your original question about domain name length I'll post again.

Hope this helps,

James

On 07:23:03 29 January 2008 ThomasCasill wrote:
>Our company is rebranding and there is a feeling that we
>should change our main web url from
>(http://www.thismanyletters.com) www.thismanyletters.com
>to www.thenewthismanyletter.com .
>
>Now my feeling is that the shorter the url the better in
>terms of click through rate and retention however I don't
>have any actual stats to back this up and I'll need these
>to win the argument.
>
>Can anyone help me to move this from a subjective
>discusssion to one with facts?
>
>Thanks
>
>As per my understanding it does not make a significant
>difference if your        
>    web  urls  are 
>short  or long  only the thing that matters is
>the simplicity of        
>    your  web urls. Web urls should
>be simple and user should find it easy to
>           
>memorize it.