how to move from my-site.com to mysite.com?

Without loosing traffic of course!

[silverbytes]

I own a domain www.my-site.com already positioned and working and I have now www.mysite.com... which is much better don't you think?
How to move to mysite.com without loosing my traffic? How to handle it?

[mack]

There are a number of ways of doing this. I will try and point out a couple and hopefully other members will offer opinins or alternatives for you.

1. Place your site on your new domain and alter the old site so that all links point to their new locations on your new domain. you should also use the <no index> meta tag but allow follow so that google bot will follow the links to the new content but will not continue to index your origional content.

2. Use htaccess to set up a redirect. This will work by sending all users and spiders to the same page but on your new domain. This will pass "most" of your pagerank onto your new domain.

I think I would probably go with option 1 for a month then swap over to option 2

It might be worth while waiting until we know exactly what Google is up to, before making such a massive change to your site. If you just go ahead and do it it may take a while before changes are reflected in the index.

Mack.

[silverbytes]

Will Google like step 1? Having all my links pointing to an external site? Sound like cheating... I know is not but it sounds like...

Do you mean I point my links as asbolute paths? instead /mylink
[mynewdomain...]

[jdMorgan]

silverbytes,

I would emphasize step 2 of mack's plan - redirect the site. Also, to the extent possible, you want to get as many incoming links as possible updated to reflect the new domain. This is an opportunity for you to do two things:
First, standardize your incoming links as to whether they point to www.yournewdomain.com/ or to yournewdomain.com/

Second, you have the opportunity to request changes to the link text on these links to your site. Some sites have no standard linking rules and some do. On those that don't, you could ask them to change "bad" link text, "click here [example.com] to visit SBCo," for example, to, "Visit SBCo for the finest fuzzy blue widgets [example.com]." Mix it up. DO NOT request them all to use the exact same phrase!

When changing domains as opposed to IP addresses, it can take a long time for all search engines to pick up the change. Plan on keeping both sites live for several months, and possibly up to six months.

I believe mack would answer, "Yes" to your question about canonical-URL links.

HTH,
Jim

[GodLikeLotus]

I have just be in the same position. Origninally had my-site.co.uk and recently aquired mysite.co.uk, however with 71 different web sites linking to the original my-domain.co.uk I thought it best to just point the new mysite.co.uk to the other. The new domain is what I promote when using traditional advertising (newspapers, magazines, TV etc) and the 1 I quote when asked over the phone or in conversation. What I found is that it is much easier to see where the direct hits are coming from whereas before I did not really know which off line advertsing was working. I now beleive it is even better to have several domains thus allowing me to see a much picture about what advertsing and promotion works best.