Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
For reasons not relevant here, I have to exit a top ranking domain name. Yes, a blow. The question I face is how to buy time? How can I keep hold of my #1 Placement, or close to it, for the next 3-4 months?
I keep control of BOTH domain for this period, but have to shift my content pretty much immediately, and replace it with a page stating broadly that we have moved.
My options appear to be:
1) A Meta Refresh
I could stick a 5 second meta-refresh on the original, but I would actually prefer a 0 second one. Would the latter attract a penalty?
Has anyone any experience of that? I doubt a 5 second refresh would attract one, but what about 0 seconds?
The idea is that Google would crawl the original, and it would remain there or thereabouts because the right sort of keywords are still on the pre-refreshed 'we are moving' page (I assume Google still crawls the original page even for a refresh time of 0).
2) A 301
Indeed! It sounds as though this just hasn't been fixed, and that a 301 would blow both the new and old sites out of the water for at least a few months.
Is this still the current state of play?
3) A 302
I wonder how this would work. I sense that the implications might be similar to a 301, and it might blow me away. Anyone?
As I stated, I just want broad placement for one or the other site to stay more or less in tact for a couple of months, whilst I can find other solutions. The above 3 spring to mind as potentials, but any other ideas would certainly be welcome too.
My recent experience is that a 301 to a recently purchased but previously existing domain is deadly, deadly, deadly. But a 301 to a brand new domain smacks right into the sandbox effect. Getting either of those situations sorted out with no bumps in a 3-4 month period is a real crap shoot. I would plan for a significant bump in the road.
A meta refresh of "0" is also deadly. If you feel you must use a meta refresh, then make it l-o-o-o-o-n-n-g (10 seconds or so.)
How many backlinks are we talking about? If I faced this situation right now (as I did last spring with a client) I would go for a big fat link on the old home page and nothing else. Then I would set out building links for the new domain and getting links to the old domain changed over as fast as possible.
What our client did was buy a domain from someone else and 301 to it. They're still sandboxed. The only domain move that seemed to go smoothly on Google in recent history used the "we've moved" link approach. Very naive and tech-free in its appearance.
<edited for spelling and clarity>
[edited by: tedster at 9:52 am (utc) on Dec. 13, 2005]
