Changing to a registered domain from a free website service.

How would Google work?

[guddu]

I have a client with a well optimized website with www.geocities.com free service. Now the client wants to purchase a domain for himself and wants all the traffic from Google and other search engines and directories directed to the the new domain.

As per my view, use of 301 redirection is not possible through geocities. So, I have advised him to use Meta Redirection instead, to transfer users to the new domain. Also, when the new domain would start achieving results at Google and other search engines, than we can initially use <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">, then remove all the old pages from geocities.com, use of robots.txt and the Google's URL Removal System.

Can you please suggest a better way out?

[Brett_Tabke]

>advised him to use Meta Redirection instead

Yes - it's best to bite-the-bullet and go for it without any nerfing around. Move the whole thing and leave meta refreshes in their old places.

[guddu]

Thanks Brett. You helped me come out of the confusion.

Regards

Guddu

[g1smd]

Umm, I would recommend that you do three things.

* Use <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> instead.

* Change all site navigation such that every link on the old site points to the equivalent page on the new site. That will ensure that the first click on anything takes you over to the correct page, but on the new site instead.

* Find the most important sites that already link to your old site, and contact them with details of you new site. Maybe you could also suggest the anchor text that they use to link to you (but you should do slightly different anchor text on each site).

Google will eventually pick up the links to the new site, and should list it in place of the old site.

I just did this for a site moving domain, and Google stopped listing the old site on -fi on 2003-06-15. It added the new site in its place the same day.

Results on www bounced around over the next few days, depending on which data centre served the results. The new data spread to a new datacentre each day, finally ending up with -in dropping the old site on 2003-06-22 and listing only the new one. Results on www now always show only the new site.

The new site went online on 2003-05-04, and the noindex,follow tags were added to the old site on 2003-05-16.

[guddu]

This is quite fine and I have used the same trick to shift old folders to new ones within a website (when the website was redesigned) but shifting domains is a bit more risky.

It involves different IPs and also looses page rank initially.

Are you achieving same positions for your new site as the old one for all keywords (especially the popular ones)?

Did you loose any of your new pages (copy of old ones) in Google.

[g1smd]

In between the time of the new site coming on line on 2003-05-04, and Google actually starting their update on 2003-06-15, I managed to get most people to re do their links to point to the new site.

The new site has more pages online than the old site did.

Every page of the old site does have an equivalent page (with same name as old site) on the new site, but the new site also has some new and extra pages.

Every page of the old site has been dropped from Google. Every page of the new site, except for one very new page has been relisted in Google.

The site has also moved from #50 to #1 for several keywords.