Hi guys,
Looking for your opinions, even you TheMadScientist! :)
I have a site that took roughly a 40% Panda hit between 1 and 2, although wasn't really affected in 2. The site is currently in ASP. I've been wanting to rewrite the site in PHP anyway, and thought today that this might be my chance since I don't have much to lose.
Here is what I was thinking, and wanted to see if I missed anything:
1) Place the new version on a subdomain. While I'm developing it, block it from the bots. What do you guys think is the best way? robots.txt in the subdomain root?
2) Once the new version launches, to keep it on the subdomain (to try and get around any panda penalty). I'd create a product mapping to 301 the old pages off the top level domain to the new subdomain (except the homepage).
I have two other subdomains already - one for a blog, and one for a forum. Both get good traffic. In essense, my homepage will become a collect all for the latest and greatest across the subdomains. Kind of like an about.com homepage, but for only 3 subdomains. The store is moving from the top level domain down to a subdomain. Thoughts?
3) A site: of my domain brings back about 36,200 pages. Should I launch the subdomain all at once with this amount of pages?
4) Do you think I will suffer any short term penalties?
5) All of my product descriptions are hand written, so I want to move them over to the new subdomain. Since it's a 301, it won't be considered duplicate content right? Or would it be since Google has cache of my old page with the same content as my new page?
BTW, my other two subdomains didn't suffer any Panda traffic drop, only the ecommerce site on the www.
Thanks all!
