Forum Moderators: phranque
The new site is on the same subject, has much of the original content, but now has a lot more new content ( it's aimed at a wider audience than the old site was). The site looks different, the design and navigation are completely different, and the copy is different (even if on the same subject much of the time).
But the old site had lots of inbound links and a decent PR of 6, so the old site has remained live while the new site was published. A clear message has been put on every page of the old site, telling people the site is no longer maintained and to visit the new site (with a hyperlink provided).
Now both sites have been up simultaneously for just over 2 months, and now the client wants to take the old site down. The new site has now built up almost as many inbound links as the old site, and has also achieved a PR of 6.
Is it safe to simply take the old site down? I'm very nervous about this because of various things I've read on here, particularly how Google might react.
I've a feeling much of the PR gained is down to multiple links from the old site to the new site (both are fairly large sites), and by removing these pages, the inbound link count will go down drastically, and have a negative effect.
I'm really confused about what to do because this ISN'T the same site, it's not duplicate content, so the issues with search engines are probably not the same (or are they?).
Looking at the last 2 months stats for the new site, around 19% of referrals originate from the old site, so a fifth of all visits are still coming from the old site.
I don't want to lose them overnight, so I need to buy some time while the re-branding message gets across to most users.
Is is sensible to take the site down, but leave the homepage with the existing message and link to the new site? That should keep the visitor count but will result in a big drop in links to the new site from the internal pages of the old site.
Or should I arrange a redirect of some kind (permanent or meta)?
My main concern is the marketing of the website - I don't want to lose visitors or search engine visibilty.
Any advice is gratefully accepted.
[webmasterworld.com...]
I'm not reposting it here, as this is an issue that comes up quite often. Latest thread on the subject was this:
[webmasterworld.com...]
>> the issues with search engines are probably not the same
Imho, they are. You have an old site that is no longer the relevant one, and you want the vistors that used to go to your old domain to go to the new domain in stead. Same goes for search engines.
The proper thing to do is to redirect all incoming traffic for some period of time (i still suggest a month or more), and then take the old site down. You will not be able to use the same rewrite condition posted in those two threads, as your pages and URLs are not the same - here's an alternative suggestion:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?old-domain\.com
RewriteRule .* http://www.new-domain.com/ [R=301,L]With this, all requests to the old domain will end up at the front page of the new domain.
/claus
I should also point out that it's not an Apache server (it's Microsoft IIS) and that the host will be the same.
Does that make a difference or will your suggested solution still do the trick?
Thanks
/claus
