Worried about domain change

pr0,google,penalization,domain,change

[Detonator]

I am in charge of a website with about 6,000 pages indexed in Google, with very good SERPs on many keywords, for which recently I had to setup a domain change since the company itself is changing its name too. Let's say it went from widgets.com to new-widgets.com, so what I did was setup an ReWriteRule clause to redirect with a 301 permanent redirect all of the traffic in widgets.com pages to its corresponding pages in new-widgets.com. I was so confident this was going to work sice I've learn by reading so many post in this forum that is the "right" way of handling a domain change scenario like this. But a couple of days ago I realized that almost all of the pages (in fact, ALL except the homepage which has a PR5) have a PR0. I don't really think this is because Google hasn't crawled my site yet since I can see Google's "Cached Snapshot" for all those pages. I was trying not to panic but I can no longer help it. It's kind getting me nervous looking at that white PR bar in all of my new pages and at the same time trying to explain to my boss what is going on everytime he calls me on the phone. I would fint it very, very frustrating if this was some sort of penalization since in one hand I don't think I did anything wrong and on the other hand, I have seen so many websites doing excellent in the search engines which are using all kinds of "nasty" things like microscopical links in near-transparent text, doorway pages, keyword spamming, etc. which I reported them like 5 months ago and they're still there up high on the rankings with a healty PR as well, but let's leave that to another story. Right now I'm very concerned about this PR0 problem. Can any of you guys and gurus please give me a bit of a clue (or hope for that matter) about this? I'm just trying to figure out if I did anything wrong or (as I told to my client) this is just a matter of time until the next update cycle? Thanks in advance!

[troels nybo nielsen]

How are your keywords doing in SERPs now? And how is traffic?

[Detonator]

The SERPs have been doing quite, and they still are, even after this Florida Update thing going on, they're still ranking #1 on several keywords, but the problem is they're ranked #1 under the old domain name, and the new domain name is listed several positions under it, sometimes several pages further, and sometimes not even seen at all. Right now we're getting the hits anyway, on the old domain name a 301 redirect tranfers the traffic to the new domain name. But I'm concern about what will happen when GOOGLE finds that 301 redirect, dischards the old domain and keeps only the new one.

[troels nybo nielsen]

I am no expert in problems of this kind. To me it looks like Google right now regard the new pages as duplicate content. Perhaps the problem will solve itself in some weeks.

I believe that there are other members who have had problems like yours. Hopefully they will see this thread and tell about their experiences.

[optimist]

Detonator>>

point the domains to the same IP (same DNS Name Server) and the same folder and Google shold keep all the backlinks the same. Keep the old domain as is!

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Can someone tell me how to redirect the files for Google, if you replace the name of the actal file? (ie: abc.html is now abcdefg.html) and all links are changes from other pages. I jus do not want to lose the PR that the older named page has by removing it totally from the server.

thanks

[Detonator]

troels nybo nielsen:

that's what I though, but I was afraid that if Google took my new domain name as a duplicate website and penalized it, do you think it will only take a few weeks to come back? I though once one gets a penalize like this it can take much longer than a few weeks to be removed, kind of like a human reviewer has to check it's really not a duplicate and remove the penalization manually... I hope I'm wrong and you're right.

optimist:

I've already done that. Both domain names are now pointing to the same IP address (which is a brand new server btw), but I'm keeping the old hosting for a couple more months because I've read somewhere that Google takes some time to refresh its DNS cache, drop the old IP address and start using the new one. Then, with a couple of ReWriteCond and ReWriteRule I'm sending a 301 status for the traffic coming from the old domain name. Actually I'm also using these 301's to "normalize" the domain (i.e. adding the "www." when it's missing)

Thank you guys for your replies! I stay tuned...

[troels nybo nielsen]

Detonator, it is important to remember, that duplicate pages are not necessarily penalised but may just be lower ranked. And as long as you actually have some high ranking pages with good traffic I do not see any really serious reason to worry. Before I knew about .htaccess I moved some sites with redirects in metatags, which actually worked fine.

[Detonator]

optimist:

Sorry, I didn't see your question. If you have web pages indexed by Google which you want to rename but you don't want to lose traffic coming from those pages you have to use a 301 (permanent) redirect. Assuming you have access to your .htaccess file, you have to add lines like the following:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule /old-page-1\.htm /new-page-1\.htm [R=301]

RewriteRule /old-page-2\.htm /new-page-2\.htm [R=301]

RewriteRule /old-page-3\.htm /new-page-3\.htm [R=301]

...etc...

(one RewriteRule line for each page that you have renamed)

The 301 you see in there means the redirect is PERMANENT, as oppossed to 302 which means TEMPORARY. Even though they both work the same for the user, they have different meanings for spiders. Basically with a 301 redirect you're telling the SE "Hey, this web page is somewhere else now, so go there and please use the new address from now on".

You can leave those line forever if you want to, but theorically you can remove them once you know all SEs have indexed the new URL.

On a side note you can use this technique not only to redirect traffic to the same site (your case) but you can use it to redirect traffic to another website as well, by using an absolute URL.

Note: Even though I know the code above works fine because I've been using it and checking its response using the Server Header Checker, I cannot tell you if this is the best possible method or syntax, since I'm not a .htaccess pro. Probably there's a better/neater way.

And if you don't have access to your .htaccess file you can try with meta tags, they should work just fine as well.