Create a site as a .com or a .org

[JillO]

Hi everyone, I'm helping a friend get a website set up in WordPress and she has purchased both the .com and .org urls. To start off she wants to set up the website as a blog under the .com and then down the road (perhaps 3-5 years) when she is ready to get her 501c3 designation she wants to move it to the .org

I believe that it would be better for her to create the site as the .org even if she isn't ready to be a 501c3 non-profit organization. What do you suggest?

I told her I would post the question here and see what others thought and the pros and cons of building the site as a .com first then changing to a .org OR building it as a .org.

Thanks!

Jill

[pamb10]

I think she should create it as the .org and redirect the .com to the .org. Switching it up later will cause all sorts of issues with links. Just my opinion...

[Lynn Terry]

I agree with Pam. Set it up on the .org and then point the .com to the site as a 301 Permanent Redirect. (Easy to do through your domain registrar.) Unless she wants the website and blog to be separate when she is ready to launch the .org end? Then I would put a "one page" on the .org and go ahead and set up the .com separately - if they are going to remain separate (but interlinked).

[JillO]

Great, thanks Pam and Lynn for your input. I'll pass it along and see what she decides to do.

[MikeF421]

From an SEO point of view the problem with starting on the .com and moving to the .org is that the search engines will not say, "Oh, ok. This is the same site just a new TLD. Well lets pass on on all the authority of the .com to the .org. No problem."

She is going to lose most of the authority and some backlinks that she has built up from the .com. Even if you do a 301 redirect at that time, studies have shown that the 301 redirect only maintains anywhere from 50-80% of its ranking power.

If she knows she is certain she is going to make this move down the road, she is far better off just starting with the .org now.

Another alternative you can look into is there is a way to mask the URL in the web browser that I believe still works. I have not done it in years, so you would have to Google how to do it. So for example... The site can be on domainname.org, but in the visitor's browser it will show domainname.com.

Like I said, I have not messed around with doing this in a long time, but I used to when I was in a MLM years ago. They gave out a website with a really ugly URL. So I masked it with something simple.

Also, I'm not really sure what the SEO implications might be for doing this, so you should definitely research that before messing around with it as well.

Hope that helps.