Can I kill Two Birds with One stone! Expert Advice Needed

[lacefrontseller]

I have an ecommerce website and I just spent about 5 months doing a complete redesign using the magento platform, the older platform was an outdated version of digishop made by sumeffect. I am ready to launch and I am not too crazy about my domain name and I would like to change it. I am hoping to do the launch and also change the domain name with a new domain name that I can easily brand. The old domain name is 5 years but not brandable at all and the new domain name is 6 months. My question is can do a relaunch and change the domain name at the same time as long as I do all my 301 redirects? Thanks in advance for your help.

[paulgl]

Keep everything intact. Add links to all pages on the old site,
at the top, bold letters, complete with anchor text, directing
the visitor to the new site if they wish.

After about 6 months to a year, do a global 301 redirect to
the new site.

Never obliterate indexed, aged content until well after you establish
another site. And really, there is no need to ever obliterate the
other stuff unless you just don't want to pay for a domain and
hosting. I can get a domain and a year of hosting for about $40.

Too many people are quick to 301 stuff. Bad idea. It's not the same
as having indexed content show up, and it's a bad visitor experience
to be zapped to a page they had no idea they were going to.

Having two sites, same niche, is a stepping stone to your own link
building empire. $40 a year is cheap to get a place to put links.

And I just remembered that you cannot 301 a domain without
paying for the domain and hosting anyway! A 301 is NOT the
same as domain forwarding from your host.

Paul

[dburk]

Hi lacefrontseller,

The main thing that you want to maintain in your re-branding is your link juice going to the old URLs. If you were able to maintain the exact same URL structure of your old digishop store on your new Magento store then a simple mod rewrite script in your .htaccess file will do the trick

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^typeyourolddomainhere.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.typeyournewdomainhere.com/$1 [L,R=301]

However, if you are changing your URL structure then you may need to add a line for each and every old URL to point it to the new URL.

I would recommend that you not leave the old domain pointing to the old store, if you want to have all of your link juice pointing toward the new store. If so then add the 301 redirects now.