Redirecting a Domain

301 Moved Permanently from Domain A to Domain B

[Amicro]

Hi all,

I'm wondering about something concerning a domain we're using that has been active for 1 year. Its a domain we've been using for our company's storefront. At the present time we're working on migrating all our company's product to a new shopping cart system that is much more stable and easier to use from the customer's perspective. But here's the rub. All the product pages on the old storefront have been thoroughly indexed and we're not exactly in a hurry to just toss away to the wind the advantages that come with product pages that have been indexed and in Google's database for all this time.

My question is this: Would a permanant redirect of domain "A" to domain "B" ( where the new storefront is running ) afford us the advantage of being able to take advantage of the pages that are already indexed while redirecting all the traffic from domain "A" to domain "B" and not hurt us?

If I've got it worked out right this sure would save us a lot of time and effort making the migration a complete reality. Otherwise I'm going to have to edit the crap out of the asp pages that the old storefront is made of the move traffice from one place to the other. I'm not exactly looking forward to that possibility. I could sure use the help and advice of far more seasoned and experienced webmasters than myself.

thanks,

[jcoronella]

If you do a permanent redirect (301), your new URL will take over the old and inherit all the links. However, a 301 will typically drive you out of the serps for some period of time (2-6 weeks). I haven't done this for a while and google in particular may have sped this process up. If you have a general pattern to your redirects, you can do this site wide, or set up an individual redirect for each page.

After you set up the 301, you want to start going to your linking sites one by one and have them update the url just so someday 3 years from now you forget about the old domain and someone moves it.

Alternatively, you could 302 the pages. This will keep the old site in the serps while you get all your links changed to the new domain. Your new domain will get the benefit of the 302'd PR (for google).

This advice is primarily for google. Other engines vary, but a 301 is an accepted method.

[pageoneresults]

However, a 301 will typically drive you out of the serps for some period of time (2-6 weeks).

I've not experienced that situation yet. What I see happening is this. We set up the 301 for the old-page to the new-page. Within 48-96 hours Google has indexed the new-page and still has the old-page in the index. In many cases, there are indented results with the old-page and new-page. After approximately 20-40 days, the old-pages are purged and the new-pages take their place.

As far as setting up the 301. To really take advantage of the old-page listings, you might want to consider setting up an ISAPI filter (if on IIS) and capitalizing on those old listings.

I would set up a 301 for each old-page to its respective new-page. This way you are redirecting the user to the correct page instead of sending them through the home page which is what most people do. I think many visitors are lost in that type of scenario. They were expecting to find information relevant to their query and you've redirected them to a home page and left them to fend for themselves.

Google seems to be on the ball in handling 301s, 302s and 304s, or at least that has been my experience. Other search engines are slower to respond but eventually get it right. You'll need to keep that old domain active for a while while the redirections are in place, I'd estimate between 4-6 months.

<added> You'll also want to utilize the robots.txt protocol and disallow all bots from indexing the old site...

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

[jcoronella]

I've not experienced that situation yet. What I see happening is this

Good news. I haven't done it for a while, and have only done it a couple of times.

[Amicro]

Thanks all. The information and advice given here will save me tons of effort and time. I really appreciate you all taking the time to post back to this topic. Now, all I've gotta do is get management to get off the stump on this one. :)

[Purrl]

I dunno about this 301 business.. I was going to post a new topic and ask what I'm doing wrong because this type of redirection has stomped out my keyword results.

I was on the first page on most of the search engines with my keywords and now on one of the most important engines (namely google) I don't even make it under 900 results! Ugh! What am I doing wrong? My PR transferred, google picked up my new domain name within 2 days, and on the 4th day dropped my old url from my keyword searches. Now 2 months later patiently waiting, and changing some of my backlinks and the most important my dmoz listings, nothing is happenning. My site feels dead :( Is there anything I can do to repair this damage? In an attempt I've taken off my 301 redirection via .htaccess and now I'm worried I'll be penalized. Of course adding insult to injury one of my competitors just changed their domain name too, and yet both their new name and old one sit pretty as number 1 & 2 with the keywords I'm targeting. Any advice would be so greatly appreciated.