Forum Moderators: mack
I have had a free site with geocities for about 2 years. In this time, there are quite a few regular visitors as well as people that link to me, etc..
Before that, I had a site with homestead that was free.
Well, I bought my own domain name and got a host after all of these years.
My question is, I want to allow my visitors access to my geocities site especially since I am in the search engines under the geocities site address and as well, also other pointers to my geocities free site.
But I don't think this is very realistic. I mean, i will have to start using my new site and it will be the one I want indexed in the search engines, etc..won't it?
The problem is, I don't know whether to keep my geocities site up and running, *it is still available as of now* or whether to just cancel it out altogether and submit my new site to search engines all over again!
What would you do?
Have i confused all of you enough already? Lol
One friend told me that i should keep my geocities site going and start the new site (submit it to search sites) like an entirely new site.
I think you are right to want to concentrate all your efforts into you’re new site, a site with it’s own domain name and real web hosting is sure to be better received by your visitors that a site hosted on a free space provider. If I was you I would simply close down the geocities site. On the index page simply put up a message we have moved and a link to your new site. Search engine spiders will follow this link and index your new content. By removing all your old content from the geocities website this will also lead to the search engine spiders getting a 404 message when they attempt to re-index your internal pages. This will lead to them being removed from the index. It will however index the content from your new site. If you have people linking to your geocities site email them saying something like "We are pleased to have completed our move to our new server" make it sound good, let them know that your move is an improvement, if they linked to you in a free host there is no reason why they wouldn’t link to you on a proper domain.
Be sure to remove all your content from the Geocities host, to avoid any duplicate content issues. I think the duplicate contend issues have been blown out of proportion but it is not worth taking the risk.
All the best with your move, hope all goes well
The duplicate content thing may have been blown out of proportion, but not if you get caught! It can mean months of not having your domain listed.
If your new domain will be an entirely different layout with different content (text and images) you could be ok to leave you old geocities site up for a month or so until the search engines find the new domain - but if the two sites are the same I would do as Mack suggested and dump all the pages except the home page and put up the "moved" message.
You are right that you want the domain listed now but if you get caught with duplicate content the old geocities site could be the one that is kept while the domain gets axed - maybe permanently or at least for months and months.
