Have to change a domain name - need to maintain placement

Should I mirror existing page structure with 301-redirects?

[sharbel]

Hi everyone,

I have an e-commerce site that I've been SEO'ing for a few months and its starting to rank well (especially in Yahoo/MSN). Now, some trademark issues came up and we have to re-brand the site name which needs to get done in the next month.

Obviously, I want to somehow keep our rankings or atleast find a way for the crawlers to follow over to the new site.

My initial thought was to have all the pages from current site (domain1.com) redirect (301) to new site (domain2.com). However, that's sort of telling the crawlers that www.domain1.com/widget-item1.com is permanently moved to www.domain2.com. Would it make more sense to, at a page level, do a redirect to www.domain2.com/widget-item1.com? In other words, not just lump the redirect to the index page of the new site, but actually do a 301 redirect page by page to the new comparable page on the new domain?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

[sharbel]

<bump />

[2by4]

you redirect every request from the old domain to the new domain, the 301 sends each request olddomain.com/page1 to newdomain.com/page1

There's different ways you can do that, one is to just point the old domain at the new domain, then rewrite all non www.newdomain.com to www.newdomain.com. The other way is to keep the old domain hosted, then just add a 301 there that forwards all requests to newdomain.com/page-requested.

No matter what you do, you'll very likely fall in google, into the sandbox, about which some people like to debate if it exists, but once you get in it, there's no debate necessary. Things to avoid: adding many new links to new domain fast.

Sandbox can last upto 1 year if you are unlucky, 6 months if it goes well, 2 months if it goes extremely well, but don't hold your breath.

[sharbel]

Our Google rank is just fledgling anyway.. we have good MSN/Yahoo rank though. Hopefully we can maintain it.

Thanks for your help.