Epic Insights

Edition 42  ·  Oct 20, 2026

The Big Story

If someone's pitched you lately on putting your town in your web address, or renaming your pages so the city shows up in every one, the idea sounds reasonable. Google's own search team said last week that the words in a web address are a very small ranking signal, though. And changing the address, for the whole site or a batch of pages, is a site move, which is the part the pitch tends to leave out.

When a business moves its website to a new address, the job has two parts. You point every old page at its new home (that's a redirect), and you tell Google about the move in Search Console. Google's own guidance says that for a small or medium site, most pages should make the trip in "a few weeks," with some ranking ups and downs along the way. And to be fair, the tools usually work.

Usually. Last week a site owner described doing all of it by the book at the start of the year. Traffic recovered by April. Then, about four months after the move, Google started showing the old address again and dropped more than 5,000 of the new site's pages from its results. A Google search advocate replied that "sometimes things just take a particularly long time to be fully processed" and suggested a settings fix.

SEO consultants who handle these cases have reported similar stalls. One has a theory: a move makes Google take a fresh look at whether a site's pages are worth keeping, and sites without much original to say don't make it across. She's clear she can't prove it yet, and Google hasn't said anything like it.

So treat your web address like the sign out front. Change it when the business really changes, like a new name or a merger, not because someone promised Google would like the new one better. When you do move, keep every old page pointing at its exact match for at least a year (Google's words are "as long as possible"), keep paying for the old domain, and move the whole site at once. Then give it a few months before deciding how it went, which is easier said than done when the phone's quiet.

Quick Hits

Ask Epic

No! Please keep the one you've got.

Like we said up top, Google's own search team says the words in a web address are a very small signal for rankings. Small enough that it's not worth trading anything for.

And you'd be trading a lot. Your current address has years behind it: links from the chamber and local news, your Business Profile, every invoice and truck door it's printed on. Switching means redirecting all of that and waiting for Google to catch up, which is this week's whole Big Story. A name's easier to remember than a phrase, too.

If you want to show up for "furnace repair in Erie," say it on the page. Write a service page that answers what people actually ask about furnace repair, and mention Erie where it belongs.

Already bought the keyword domain? That's fine. Hang on to it, point it at your real site, and call it a day.

What Epic's doing for you this week

This week we're keeping an eye on traffic after rankings got jumpy Oct 15 and 16, and we'll tell you if a dip on your site looks like more than a bad day. We're checking that redirects from past site moves are still in place and still land on the right pages. And we're reading Meta's final terms before Oct 30, so we can tell you plainly if anything needs to change. If something needs your attention, you'll hear it from us directly.