Multiple sites ->> one, how?

Combining several sites

[Wlauzon]

Any ideas on how to do this best?

site1 and site2 will be moving to and be combined with (new) site3. That is the easy part, as I can just do htaccess 301's. The new site will be using the URL of site1.

Big problem is that the main site, site4 needs to move to that domain also, and that host does not allow an .htaccess file.

So, will this work, and will we see any major problems?:

Get the first 3 sites all combined and set up first, then change the DNS on site 4 to one of the old site URL's, which will then 301 to the new site1?

It seems that if we just change the DNS to the new site1, we will end up with two different URL's, which we need to avoid.

[jdMorgan]

> Get the first 3 sites all combined and set up first, then change the DNS on site 4 to one of the old site URL's, which will then 301 to the new site1?

That actually sounds like a pretty good plan, providing that you:

Test, test, test, the redirect code on the (re-used) old site 1 or site 2 server to be used to redirect site 4.

Test, test, test, the code on the new site 3 server that will "receive and handle" redirected requests originally sent to site 4.

Allow a few weeks/months after new site 3 is established, and the old sites 1 and 2 have been recognized as having moved to new site 3 (i.e. the new URLs show up in search results) before starting to move site 4.

Jim

[Wlauzon]

It is kind of a clumsy way to do it, but the main site is an ecommerce site, and we cannot afford to let it go down, or to lose the thousands of incoming links to it.

Thus it looks like we will have to do this shuffle thing until all the new links get established in the search engines.

I just don't see any other way to do it without losing a lot of PR. I am hoping we don't have to keep two ecommerce sites up at the same time, but we might have to.

[edited by: Wlauzon at 7:59 pm (utc) on Feb. 6, 2009]

[jdMorgan]

Yeah, not having a way to invoke a redirect on the site 4 server is a real pain.

The good news is that you'll be done with that hosting company soon, and will be very wary of that problem in the future.

Jim

[Wlauzon]

I am not an Apache or htaccess guru, but would a mod rewrite or something work if we changed the DNS on site4 to the new site?

Or would the search engines still be seeing the wrong URL?

Eventually I want all sites of all types, forum, blog, etc to be the same main URL.