Moving to different domain name

My plan not to lose pagerank

[helleborine]

Old domain: xyz.theirdomain.com
New domain: mydomain.com

1. The index page on xyz.theirdomain.com remains the portal page. All relative links will be changed to hard links to mydomain.com. I hope this will preserve the ranking of the front page.

2. Visitors of internal pages, usually from SERPs, on xyz.theirdomain.com will be forwarded to the corresponding page on mydomain.com via a meta-refresh and "page moved" backup link.

3. After some time (?) the internal pages on xyz.theirdomain.com will be deleted.

4. The internal pages on mydomain.com all contain a link to the index.html page - this is going to become a hard link to xyz.theirdomain.com/index.html

In other words, for visitors, my index page will continue to be on xyz.theirdomain.com. Everything else on mydomain.com.

Do foresee any problems with my plan?

[AnonyMouse]

Be very very careful, and be prepared for a drop in traffic. My experience has been that any significant changes in site structure takes 6 months or more to recover from.

I think this is because Google sees all the pages as "new", and all the links as new, and therefore it takes time to regain ranking. I used 301's to do something similar last year, and oh-boy do I wish I had not :-(

[helleborine]

Mmmm... maybe I should do this gradually... very very slowly... I don't want to lose traffic, that is my main site.

[Lorel]

It sounds like you were on a free site and now wanting to set up your own domain. Regardless I don't think there is any easy answer to switch over. You could set up a 301 redirect to the new site (if your host will alow it) but as stated above you may have to accept a drop in traffic/rank for a few months but it should eventually work itself out. I did this to a couple sites and it took over 6 months to resolve itself.

If you leave the old site up with original content and just link to the new one with same content then your new site could be penalized with supplemental results. Don't use a meta refresh as SEs have recognized meta refreshes as a tool of spammers so not a good idea to use those.

Another option would be to set up the new site with totally original content and link to it from the other site. SEs can tell who owns the domains (it's in Google's pending patent) but if your old site was on a freebie site it won't be in your name so you may get away with it. Use a different email, name and contact data on the new site to be sure. Otherwise bite the 301 bullet and be prepared to wait it out.

[awebguy]

Helleborine,

Include significant pieces of new original content in your new or old web pages to be not penalized by google for duplicated content

[helleborine]

Thanks for the tips.

I was contemplating a gradual move, page by page, over a period of months, being mindful of never duplicating content. It'll be one site divided over two domains... if I see there are penalties, I'll backpedal.

I don't want to bit that 301 bullet!

[BigDave]

That 301 bullet is the only way to do it right. Otherwise you will be screwed on any of the deep links.

Also, don't link to any "index.html" page. Link to the directory that contains that page.

www.example.com/

instead of

www.example.com/index.html