Parked Domains and 301 Redirects

Migrating Parked Domains and 301 Redirects to a New Domain

[davidcorman]

I manage a domain that currently has 7 other parked domains as well as 301 redirects for each domain. The site wants to change the domain name so that one of the 7 domain names becomes the main domain and the others are now parked at it. How do I do this to ensure that they do not lose their indexed pages and ranking in Google? Is it sufficient to create a new domain, park all the other domains there, and institute a 301 (wildcard) redirect for all 7 domains?

[jdMorgan]

If you change domains the pages of the site *will* lose their rankings for a few days up to many months, as Google re-indexes the site and begins to pass the PageRank of the old URLs to the new URLs.

If these are high-PageRank pages, it might take a week. If the PageRank is not so high, it might take nine months. Do not change your URLs without being prepared for reduced rankings and traffic.

Google could probably make this process faster if they wanted to, but they do not like it when you change URLs, and so they likely do not want to make it 'easier' to do.

The definition of 'park' is very fuzzy, but it should not be necessary (and is not advisable) to define yet another domain. You might want to consider getting hosting with a unique IP address, so that you can simply use DNS to point all the domains to the one server's IP address, and then redirect all non-canonical domains to the canonical domain within that server itself. This gets rid of the mickey-mouse "parking" and all of the potential errors that such services can cause. In the U.S. getting an IP-based shared server usually costs about $1.00 per month more than a name-based shared server at "middle-tier" hosting companies.

Jim

[g1smd]

*** Google could probably make this process faster if they wanted to, but they do not like it when you change URLs, and so they likely do not want to make it 'easier' to do. ***

Ta da! See the 'move site' function added to Google WMT/WMC just a few days ago.

Read all of the instructions, and fully understand all of the disclaimers and limitations before you do anything at all.

[davidcorman]

g1smd: I cannot find that feature that you mentioned. Where is it?

jdMorgan: I do not entirely understand what the problem is with parking domains. Currently, the site in question has 7 parked domains and ranks well in search results and has thousands of indexed pages in search engines. From which perspective is parking a domain an issue?

[jdMorgan]

"Parking" using any kind of "service" outside of the server itself introduces additional technical and administrative dependencies which can be avoided simply by "hosting" all of the domains on an IP-address-based server using standards DNS records to define that IP address for each valid hostname, and doing any/all non-canonical-to-canonical domain redirects within the server itself.

Jim

[davidcorman]

I hear what you are saying but these domains are currently parked on domain #1. The parking is also done on the server level, not outside. Do you recommend "un-parking" these domains or keeping them as is?

[g1smd]

Look to the "change address" function in WMC.