Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have been digging through the WebmasterWorld archive to find information on rebranding your site. We are changing our company name from oldsite.com to newsite.com and the consensus here on WebmasterWorld clearly is to use 301 on a page by page basis.
What is less clear from my digging is how this change will affect PR and traffic after the switch. Everyone recommends mailing all incoming link holders and get them to update their links to newsite.com - but unfortunately for us, this is nearly impossible since most of our links are from news sites.
We've done interviews and have incoming links from CNN, BBC etc. and I don't see any way CNN would update an old link like that.
So: if we cannot update old links, how would a site wide 301 redirect affect our SE traffic and PR?
Like the other guys I plan to do a page by page 301, and wondering what the effects are likely to be.
Also I'm wondering what an htaccess file with 500 or so redirects in it will do to the server response time.
Anyone have any direct experience of this kind of thing?
Changing all the urls on an existing domain is also a big deal, but with intelligent study of the old urls - which are important site entry pages and backlink target pages - you can judiciously use 301 redirects and have a lot less ranking trouble than a new domain name brings.
I think you should use url_rewrite to call the new pages whenever the old ones are called. I.e. don't change any urls at all.
But still no answer - no one knows what the traffic/PR effect is of a site-wide 301 redirect to a new domain is?
My main concern is to lose traffic from our upcoming domain change.
Also I'm wondering what an htaccess file with 500 or so redirects in it will do to the server response time.
Not bad at all. There would be less processing involved than with a 500 line PHP file. It would only become an issue if your server was severely overloaded. What you should do is after 6 months, periodically check your logs and remove any 301s that weren't accessed for at least 2 months.
This will give the SEs time to clean out their index, and you will be able to tell which pages have important links to them by wether bots or people follow them.
eg
RewriteEngine On
#RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.oldsite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ htt p://www.newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Did this to a site last may/june, took till early December before the site got back to its original amount of visitors.
PR is now (after the January update)as it was in May. Backlinks, still have them to the old site. Still have the 301 running from the old site, just because of them.
If your changing the content, filenames then a whole load of other factors come in to play.
Make sure you can afford the drop and or advertising costs.
goodluck!
appi2, did you get any new inbound links to the new domain between May and December?
First thing I did was get the Dmoz listing updated (which they did in less than a week).
Emailed other sites asking if they could update their links.
Made sure big G new the site was mine by adding it to the webmaster console.
Sulked, fumed, ranted, vented spleen and nearly gave in.
If I was going to do it again. I wouldn't.
If I had to do it again. Then I'd back it up with advertising.
It may be better/worse for other sites.
Is your site high traffic?
> Made sure big G new the site was mine by adding
> it to the webmaster console.
This is new to me - what is this?
[google.com...]
A follow-up question:
If oldsite.com is pointing to newsite.com with a 301, then what happens when people search on Google for "oldsite"? Will newsite.com then be listed in the top?
Because... if newsite.com is listed at the top then people who only know about oldsite.com will be LESS likely to click on the link to newsite.com, right?
Is it advisable to put "newsite - formerly know as oldsite" in the title? How will the client know that newsite has anything to do with oldsite?
All thoughts are much appreciated.
But a search for the usual keywords didn't, thats what frustrates.Google knows about the change but we went through a drop in rankings for our usual search terms.
Is it advisable to put "newsite - formerly know as oldsite" in the title?
How will the client know that newsite has anything to do with oldsite?
Good question. And how will they trust the change?
I'm going to have to bail out of this one and say 'you should know your users! Pre warn them maybe'.
Just a note, none of this is hard fact.. its just what happened to our little site. "Milage may vary".
We recently re-launched our site (18th Jan 2007). We changed the old abbreviated .htm urls e.g. domain.co.uk/wid_cat_bl.htm to a new easy to follow structure e.g domain.co.uk/widget-category/blue-widget/.
We used proper 301 code.
Initially Google took the pages no problem (for about 2 weeks)and ranking was the same until our host restarted the server and forgot to enable asp in .htm format...this meant that for 4 days our 301 were no longer working. We quickly spotted this and fixed it hoping that there would be no harm done.....
....Well, we're now down to 40% of our original Google traffic. This is due to some of the new pages ranking lower than the old pages and some pages seem to be regarded as duplicate content and are right at the bottom of the SERPs.
The SERPs did momentarily improve dramatically (from Sun-Tues) but seem to have gone back since.
This might be due to:
Incedentally when you do the "site:" command on google our domain comes up as 1-2 of 260. When you expand the results it shows anywhere between 1050 and 1720 (there are actually 1812 pages).
<pathetic-self-pity>My first child is actually due tomorrow so hopefully by the time i get back from paternity leave this whole sorry mess will have sorted itself out. Fingers crossed.</pathetic-self-pity>
> The problem is: If you old domain name contains
> a relvant keyword, changing domain names will hurt you!
Good point, but actually the new domain has a better kw. At least that will help a little.
thanks for asking...actually it did...kind of.
It's still not up to the old levels but is at about 75%...which is great.
It does still seem very variable and we also seem to have some sort of other problem with our competitor stealing our meta descriptions and ranking above us (I've posted on this but am waiting for it to get past the mods).
However, things are looking on the up and whilst i fully expect a few fluctuations until things settle fully I am hopeful that we've seen the worst of it (fingers crossed).
Marra
Ps - we had a baby boy (Elliot Samuel).....it really is great how much he put things into perspective...plus I'm far too knackered to really worry too much about the site.
PPS - if you think watching the data centres isn't much fun, wait until you've seen your wife give birth! ;)
However, if page oldsite.com/a.html has 10 inbounds,
and someone adds a new link to newsite.com/a.html
that does not equal what you would think [ 10 + 1 ].
It equals [ +0 ]
@minnapple
> It equals [ +0 ]
Don't you mean "It equals [ +1 ]", at least?
And, are you sure of this? Doesn't this imply that you loose all PR on newsite?
Man, I'm too confused and scared to make the big shift yet!
