301 redirect question

htaccess redirect

[keress]

My understanding has been that in order to ensure you loose the least possible rank for your pages when you do an update that involves a lot of url changes you have to individually redirect each old page to the new comparable page.

I just wrote up probably a hundred of these redirects for our site but now when I try to upload them all I'm seeing that just the generic, one-line redirect (redirect 301 / [newdomain.com)...] seems to be doing the job. In other words, if I request an old url for a page deep in the site, the generic, one-line redirect will take me to exactly the same page at the new address.

Oh, I think I know why. The old subpage urls are identifical to the new ones, except for the domain name.

So, am I correct in assuming that I've done all that can be done to ensure that Google will associate the old individual pages with the new?

[jdMorgan]

If the URL-paths are the same, then you've done all that you need to do; The search engines don't know (or care) what code you used to implement it. The key words in the advice that you read about per-URL redirects were likely aimed at emphasizing that if the URL-paths have been changed, then it is important to redirect revenue-critical old URLs to directly-related-and-relevant new URLs; Since you've changed only the domain here, and not the URL-paths, this doesn't apply unless you also changed the page content. If so, you need only be sure that the new page content is directly-related and relevant to the old.

Changing domain names can be 'bumpy' and you may suffer a temporary loss of "trustrank" for anywhere from a week to nine months depending on your current ranking and trust factors. As long as you've planned for that, you've done all you can. However, if you have not planned for that, and if you do see ranking and revenue problems related to this domain change, then *Do Not* try to reverse the redirect and 'set it back the way it was' because this will again reduce the trustrank and start the probationary clock all over again, making the problem worse, not better. In most cases, this 'bump' is short, though.

Jim