Should I redirect homepage

[maisiefantaisie]

I had a site that sold widgets and ranked number 2 in Google for it's search term. Those widgets have now been moved to a new site that sells lots of other things including the widgets.

I have redirected 301 all of the old sites pages (except the homepage) to their corresponding inner pages on the new site.

My question is should i redirect the homepage of the old site to the homepage of the new site. As I said the new site sells lots of other products including the widgets.

Would it have any negative impact on google listings for the new site? I don't want any problems at all with the new site. What would be the most transparent way to do it.

Any advice would be gratefully received.

[lucy24]

To clarify: Is the home page now the only remaining page on the old site? Or are there other non-widget-related pages that remain untouched? Do those pages have a unifying theme that's different from the original home page?

If there's nothing left but the home page, then that page is at risk for being seen as a ...

:: detour here ::

Oi! Where'd the Glossary go?

Oops. Someone else will come along and finish my sentence, because I have gone blank on the technical term. It is Not A Good Thing, anyway.

[maisiefantaisie]

Hi Lucy24, I wanted to shut the site down but redirect the pages to a new site where the product now resides. The old site sold one product only and all it's pages was hosted by company A. So I switched the hosting to a cheaper option and pointed DNS servers to hosting company B.

All of the old pages were part of a template hosted by company A and as I switched, they have now gone.

Now all that I have hosted on company B is an index homepage file stating that the company has now moved, a htaccess file that includes all of the redirects to the new site and a 404 error file for unimportant pages that i didn't feel I needed to move (about us..terms and conditions etc). The 404 error page also shows the URL address of the new site.

My conundrum is whether I should redirect the index file to the homepage of the new site. At the moment it is the only page that doesn't redirect.

The new site includes the product from the old site but is a more general store of which the old product is just one item.

I hope this all makes sense?

[lucy24]

If you're shutting down the site, then you'll have to redirect the home page sooner or later. But it's your judgment whether it should go to the new site's home page, or some sub-page that's closer to the specific content of the old site.

(a) "I've closed down my boutique. Try {big-box} instead."
or
(b) "I've closed down my boutique. Go to the {suchandsuch} department at {big-box} and ask for Ron."

Option (b) seems nicer-- but only if such-and-such department really exists and Ron doesn't say "Who? Never heard of 'em."

[maisiefantaisie]

Thanks for your reply Lucy24, As the old site only sold one product the home page focus on that product. There is an inner 'catalogue' page that then showed all the product.

I have pointed the inner catalogue page to the catalogue on the new site. Would it be OK to also point the homepage to the same 'new' catalogue. So both pages 301'd to the new catalogue page.

[lucy24]

Uh-oh, this is the Apache forum isn't it. Not the SEO forum. I can only say how to do stuff, not whether it's a good idea.

:: looking vaguely around for g1, who can do both ::

Redirecting two pages to the same place is generally OK. It's only a problem when you do massive redirects: hundreds or thousands or a whole site all pointing at the same page. That's when google starts muttering about "soft 404s".

Other questions that might be asked in an SEO-oriented forum:

-- would it be a good idea or a bad idea to de-index the old home page right away (so you don't pick up new viewers for a site that is about to disappear)?
-- should the new catalog page get some careful work so it responds to the same search terms that used to bring people to the old site?

et cetera. But don't ask me ;)

[not2easy]

I am a little confused because it sounds like you have moved your domain to a new host. No one could ever land on your old index page in that case unless I missed that this is a new domain name? Try visiting your old site and see what visitors would see there. If that is not what you want old links and old bookmarks to see, then redirect it to the new site. Why not?

So I switched the hosting to a cheaper option and pointed DNS servers to hosting company B.

If your old hosting account is closed and you have changed the nameservers, they are not going to land on your old site - so yes, you would need to have moved the index page too unless you have created a replacement. In this case I don't understand the need for redirects?