Moving a website your recommendations needed

[The_Hat]

So here's the deal, for quite a long time I was the curator of a website owned by another company but they were buying their internet upstream from a company I am a partner in.. I had created a separate website (no url pointing to it, it was just a domain.com/path setup) well I am now getting pretty good traffic to it (and pretty good adsense revenue..) but I just recently heard a rumor (he evidently hasn't thought it proper to tell me)that the guy that heads up the other company has decided to try his hand at doing his own website..(ewwww) He is working on it elsewhere.. so soon the TLD will point somewhere else.. so I need to get my stuff off of there and get the traffic sending to it ASAP..

MY QUESTION IS: I have already copied over the files that have to do with that little sub-website to my own website but need to know how best to get the traffic sent from the old location to the new location.. What I was thinking about doing is removing the page content off of the old pages and adding a meta refresh from that page to the corresponding page in the new location.. Will that work? Will google think it's o.k.?.. any ideas?

Thanks..

[edited by: The_Hat at 11:41 pm (utc) on Oct. 8, 2006]

[Quadrille]

If you have enough access to set up a 301, that's the way to go.

Move the content to your own site, without major restructuring, and install the 301. Then start getting links to your own site, and quality directory entries.

No other way has a serious chance of protecting your new market.

With the small cost of hosting and buying domains, what were you thinking? Sorry, had to ask ;)

[The_Hat]

Hey Quadrille, thanks for the response

I would setup 301s except for the fact that the site was grown more so than it was built so there are pages associated with my little subsite kinda scattered in the root of the site, (a few of the main index pages are inside of the root of the domain, but most are with in a folder)they aren't all inside of one folder domain.com/mysite.. so, as I understand 301s, that would greatly increase the headache of doing 301s for each page as it would be able to just mapped as in olddomain/mysite = newdomain/mysite.. IF I'm not understanding how a 301 is setup please correct me...

And yes... I know much better.. but as it turns out I have been kept busy enough with other projects that I just haven't had much of a chance to rearrange the architecture.. This will change once it is completely under my own brand.

If I am unable to install 301s would removing the content off the old and placing them on the new leaving meta refreshes in place as the only content on the old pages come in a close second 301s?

[Quadrille]

When it comes to the technical detail, I'm no expert at all - but you can 301 folder by folder, site by site, file by file as required, is my understanding (I have to delegate such detail!).

The meta refresh will pass on the individuals who've clicked, but will do nothing to preserve the page benefits you've built up; nothing at all. And you'll need to remove the old site to avoid duplication risks, so they will fall out of the serps (and you cannot set a 404, even).

I think a 301 is the only way to go, however fiddly; if you can rescue 'most' of the site in that way, you'll probably get most of the benefit. But even with a 301, you'll need to do some serious SEO work on the new pages (but avoid serious site reconstruction for months).

[The_Hat]

Well then.. after talking a little bit with the fella that manages the servers this evening it looks like I will be doing a little work in htaccess then. I did a little looking into it further and it looks like setting up 301s in htaccess is relatively simple.

I appreciate your counsel Quadrille