Forum Moderators: phranque
My question is, what is the best way to handle moving our site while retaining our customers and search engine rankings? We currently hold top 10 spots in all of our keywords in google. Obviously when we move to a new site we will lose some of our rankings, but we would like to keep this to a minimum.
Does anyone have any suggestions on some best practices for moving our site to a new domain, and does anyone have any experience with dealing with a Cease and Desist order? We obviously are not going to fight it since it is a multi-billion dollar company, but is there anything we should do to help minimize our losses.
Thanks everyone for your help.
btw - welcome to WebmasterWorld :)
Id atleast pretend to put up a fight to see if I could get a monetary compensation to move, even an agreement for a 301 redirect for 6 months after i gave up the domain
1) Does your site sell/promote the same products/services as the other site?
2) Do you wrongfully use the other company's name or infringe on their copyright?
I agree that you should not just cave in so easily. I used to work for a VERY large company and would sit in on meetings where they would discuss situations like you are experiencing. In most cases they were taking a chance to see if someone would give in. You get weirdo managers thinking they are hot stuff - so they tell their "in house" lawyers to write a letter... just to see "what happens".
The worst I could see happening is they don't want you to use your domain - in which case you could use a 301 redirect to your new domain...but don't give them the domain...you bought the domain...right?
It may help if you gave us a better example of the situation?
Do they sell widgets and you sell widgets - and their domain is widget-ville.com and yours is widget-ville2.com?
These rulings complex at the best and a few dollars spent getting legal advice may protect your investment.
Here is our situation, if this is in violation of the forum please feel free to remove or modify. Our site is for example: bigccompanyname-info.com. We provide links to online training sites. We have a paid subscribers area that allows access to additional sites. The company that is coming after us is bigcompanyname. They say that our name suggests a relationship between the two companies and suggests that they are the source of our products. They want us to allow the domain name to expire in January and will give us a short transfer period between now and then to remove our content.
I think this is just another ploy by a large company to throw their weight around. Its unfortunate that us small business owners have a harder time putting up a fight.
[edited by: oilman at 11:51 pm (utc) on July 26, 2004]
[edit reason] no specifics please [/edit]
Good luck,
Goober
bigccompanyname-info.com
It doesn't sound like a ploy to be honest - it sounds as if they're avoiding market confusion - which is the thrust behind many a C & D letter.
You ask me you should have researched this (The company is very well know and you know who they are I am sure!) and if you lose sales over this it's your own fault. I hope this will teach you and others to research it and don't risk it.
However I would not give them the domain, you own it and their is little they can do about as long as you don't put content/products/services that are related to their company.
We are currently talking to a lawyer just to get his opinion, but most likely won't fight it. It at least gives us a chance to clean the site up a bit and do some reworking which we have been putting off. :)
Back to my original question, is there a software program or something that helps make the transition to a new domain name easier?
Back to my original question, is there a software program or something that helps make the transition to a new domain name easier?
Apart from 301 'permanently moved' server codes, not as far as I'm aware.
Background reading here: [webmasterworld.com...]
You can also easily do it with PHP. in your httpd.conf file (assuming apache here) - point the new domain to the same directory as your files are located for the old domain. Then you could just use a couple lines of PHP to check the domain...and if it's the old domain - send 301 redirect header and point it to the same URL, but with the new domain substituted. It's a pretty easy fix.
you don't even need php... this is a simple mod_rewrite job and its one thats done every day on many sites all over the internet... again, assuming apache ;) the rewrite rule would only take two lines of very simple and straight forward code... one line for the match of the old domain name and the second line with the rewritten url and the redirect respose...
good luck!
