Forum Moderators: phranque
I have 2 websites a.com & b.com. Both the domains have good search engine placement and are well crawled.
Now I wish to move them to a new central domain xyz.com such that
a.com becomes a.xyz.com&
b.com becomes b.xyz.com
I know that it may be a dumb decision to do this, but I have to do it whether I like it or not due to some reason.
How do I do it in the best possible way? I hope the search engines would crawl the new pages quick if I do a 301 redirect and I also believe the PR may be passed to the pages on the new domain. I would also be contacting the sites that have linked to my sites to update to the new urls.
Can you please let me know the pros and cons as well as the best way to set it up and how long it may take to get everything normal as before.
TIA
1) upload the pages to the server
2) activate new domain and point it to the pages
3) get crawled by googlebot
4) redirect all requests on domain 1 to domain 3
5) redirect all requests on domain 2 to domain 3
6) wait around three to four weeks for the situation to stabilize in the SERPS
For the way to do a 301, redirect, see post #6 of this thread: Site change of URL [webmasterworld.com]
Note the placement of point 3 - i guess this will happen before your even redirect the two domains.
As you are merging two sites, and not moving one site, a 301 might be the wrong status code to return. The reason is "URL conflict" (for lack of a better term). Two pages simply cannot occupy the same URL in the search engines, so if you redirect both (a) and (b) to (c) using a 301 then the backlinks to either (a) or (b) might get ignored and disappear. One of them will win.
(a)
www.example1.com/foo.htmwww.example2.com/foo.htmwww.example3.com/foo.htmIf you do not have the same URL's on site 1 and 2, then you can safely make a 301 redirect to site 3, like this:
(e)
www.example1.com/fooA.htm --> 301 --> www.example3.com/fooA.htmwww.example2.com/fooB.htm --> 301 --> www.example3.com/fooB.htmThe index pages are something else, you cannot have both of these, as "slash" or "index" is just one URL:
(g)
www.example1.com/ --> 301 --> www.example3.com/www.example2.com/ --> 301 --> www.example3.com/These cases (g,h) will need to be a 302, as otherwise one of them will win. Here, two index pages are moved permanently to the same new location. Of course that can't happen, as only one page can occupy an URL, so one of them will be ignored.
Related thread: If you did 301's without making a third domain, one of your existing domains would likely disappear in the process, as in this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]
/claus
I just noticed this very important point. Sorry about missing it first. In the above, i assume that you want to use "domain xyz" in stead of subdomains to "domain xyz", but i see that you clarly wrote this:
a.com becomes a.xyz.com
b.com becomes b.xyz.comIn that case, a 301 is the thing to do for all pages on both domains. Like this:
(i)
www.a.com/ --> 301 --> a.xyz.com/www.b.com/ --> 301 --> b.xyz.com/The six steps at the top of this post still apply, and the link right below them points to the .htaccess redirect you should use.
Thanks again,
John
>> (1) 301 redirect www.a.com/ --> 301 --> a.xyz.com/
>> www.b.com/ --> 301 --> b.xyz.com/
That's the right way
>> (2) Since the pages/site structure would be exact same,
>> I would simply change the DNS along with the 301 redirect
>> to the new strategy/config.
Yes, exactly
>> (3) Currently www.a.com and www.b.com are on different IP
>> addresses. I intend to do a 301 redirect such that: the IP
>> address of a.xyz.com will be same as www.a.com
>> the IP address of b.xyz.com will be same as www.b.com
No problem as far as i know.
>> Inspite of doing the 301 redirect, I hope Google does not
>> treat this as mirrors since they are on the same IP address.
The 301 should make sure it's not duplicates, you can remove the old site completely once the new is getting spidered.
>> Since I am doing such a move, I was considering using hyphen (-)
>> instead of an underscore (_). I could set this along with the
>> 301 redirect. Is this a good approach and would the pagerank
>> still transfer?
Afaik, yes. No problem.
(5) How long should I continue with the 301 redirection?
Google has speeded up on this. For Google a couple of days should be enough to get spider traffic on the new domains, but for the other SE's it will take longer. I still recommend a month at least.
>> (6) In case of one site, I noticed that after they did a 301
>> redirect, Google still has pages with the old urls which actually
>> when clicked upon, go to the new url.
Yes. Google will do this for some time until it gets sorted out. Normally this is what takes the full month, while it only takes a couple of days to get spidered. It seems that the more backlinks you have, the longer it takes to switch the URLs in the SERPS.
The URL "www.example.com" (an example URL was in the sticky) is not a 301, it's a 302. This means "temporary redirect" and Google will keeep URLs that are temporary redirects. Check the server headers here:
>> The urls of the old site crawled are simple urls with no other
>> information about them. I hope it won't be considered as mirrors.
Possibly these "shadow urls" will only be removed the moment they return a 404. It's not considered as mirrors, as the "url-only" serps means that no content have been indexed.
>> (7) When would I learn whether everything that I set up went
>> correct or not? For eg: If after 10 days, I notice that Google
>> has crawled the new domain's pages, does it mean that everything
>> is fine?
If you do not see Googlebot in your log files within 10 days, something might be wrong and then again it might not. My best guess is that it will spider your new domain the very same day or the day after you make the DNS change. See this thread:
Is google getting faster in all aspects? [webmasterworld.com]
If it's not on your new domain after 10 days it still might not be an error. In some cases it will take longer. The "new googlebot", or "Deepfreshbot" has an advanced spidering pattern. Sites that update often are spidered often, and sites that are updated less frequently are spidered less frequently.
So, if you're currently being spidered monthly my best guess is that it can still take a month to get the new domains indexed.
/claus
