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I've been reading the archives all morning concerning the effect of a domain name change to the SERPS. I'm gathering pieces of information here and there, but in a nutshell, here is what I am trying to accomplish:
I need to change my old domain (old-domain.com) to a new domain (new-domain.org). My intent is to duplicate all content 100% across the two the seperate domains. There will be absolutely no linking from one site to the other. Over time, (perhaps 1-2 years), old-domain.com will go away after I have had a chance to coordinate a change in links into my site, etc. During the transition, old-domain.com will forward to new-domain.org using the control panel function with the domain name registrar (e.g., BuyDomains.com).
I've seen that Google will penalize when more than one domain to a DNS, but if I am using two seperate domains, will I get penalized? Under this scenario, is a 301 re-direct even necessary if the domain host control panel is set to forward to the old URL to the new URL?
Major thanks in advance!
One of the domains should have a 301 permanent redirect to the other domain. If you have the have the two domains out there with the same content, the search engines will likely ignore one of the domains. I'm not sure if your ISP's domain redirection facility will do a 301 redirect, but you can always try it, and then use the Server Header Checker [webmasterworld.com] to make sure that it is working the way you want it to (make sure to check inside pages as well).
Right now, with Google, it's probably not a good idea to change domain names, as you are likely to get caught by the sandbox / google lag. You might want to consider 301 redirecting the new domain to the old one, and then use the new domain for branding purposes until everything gets sorted out.
Alternatively, is there any way I can add HTML code to the existing site so that the browser URL field shows the new URL -- and just forget about builing the new web-hosted site?
At the end of the day, all I would really like to do is hide the current domain name in the browser URL field and put something else there. Even though the Google SERPs would show the old domain name, that would be fine -- just so that the user's browser URL field shows a different domain. Frame-forwarding seems to do just the opposite of what I want. Possible?
