Using 301 to redirect pages from corporate site to online shop

[neildt]

We have two websites both of which have fairly good rankings.

Based on a business decision we've decided to use one site as our corporate style site which contains company information only, and the other site to host our online shop.

My question is the corporate website has good rankings for many keyword phrases and has over 400 plus pages.

Our idea is rather than lose these pages is to redirect them to our other online shop domain using a permanent 301 redirect.

Is this the correct thing to do ? What problems can anyone see ?

[tedster]

It sounds like a good step to take - I know of several recent restructuring projects along this line.

One thing I would add to your plan is contacting the most important backlinking sites and letting them know about the change so they can link directly to the new location. If you make it easy for them, many will do it.

Are there some specific concerns that you have?

[neildt]

My only concern is the online shop being hit by a Google penalty. However, I can't really see why it would happen since we are using standard 301 permanent redirects.

Just checking that this is the normal practice and whether I should look out for any issues.

[tedster]

For optimum results, you should make sure that you avoid chains of redirects - even for canonical URL corrections. In other words:

NO
old-domain.com/page > www.oldomain.com/page > www.newdomain.com/page
old-domain.com/page > newdomain.com/page > www.newdomain.com/page

YES
old-domain.com/page > www.newdomain.com/page

[neildt]

OK, thanks for this.