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Question about domain redirects

by Aduley
10 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi everyone, let me say thanks to everyone in here that has helped me over the past months. I love this forum and everyone has been more than helpful, so I will try and make this question as short as possible.

I have a site with about 50 pages of content on it. I don't like the domain name because it is too long, very generic, and isn't very brandable.

So I am looking to build a new site (in the same niche of course) with a better domain name, maybe something that actually includes my name in it.

But, what I would like to do is take most of the content from my previous site and add it to the new site.

After that, is it possible to redirect my old domain to point towards my new domain, but strip it of all its content?

What kind of problems would this present in googles eyes? Or is it even something that is possible to do?

Sorry if this question is a little confusing. I do look forward to anyone's input though.

Thanks again everyone

Andrew
#domain #question #redirects
  • Profile picture of the author RemingtonSteele
    This is what "301 redirects" are for. If you do it correctly, there should be no issues with search engines. There are several ways to set up the redirects, depending on how the site was developed (PHP, ASP.NET, HTML, etc.).

    Since you're planning on moving the content to a new domain, you should probably redirect each old page to it's corresponding new URL, as opposed to redirecting all old pages to the homepage of your new domain. For the old pages that don't have a new home, you can simply redirect those to either the homepage or to new pages that are related to the old pages.

    You're dealing with just 50 pages, so it shouldn't take long to set this up, even if you have to redirect each page individually.

    I can help you further if you let me know what kind of site you have. Is it hosted on a Linux server or a Windows server?
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  • Profile picture of the author SageSound
    There are some redirect plugins available for WP that you could use to redirect individual pages to corresponding pages in the other site.

    However, if they're Posts, rather than Pages, that would be problematic.

    I'd probably leave the site up, as it is, with some links to the new site. Copy the content from the first site to the new domain, then add new stuff only to the newer one.

    I believe people over-analyze this stuff. If people are mainly finding the site through online sources, and clicking links to get there, then who cares how long the domain name is? All they're doing is clicking a link!
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  • Profile picture of the author dadamson
    +1 for 301 redirects.

    These will pass over your PR and backlinks from site A to site B.

    I've been in your shoes and used 301 redirects all the time.

    Pretty simple to do, just search for a quick how-to.

    Cheers,
    Dave
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  • Profile picture of the author Aduley
    Cool sounds like a 301 redirect is just what I am looking for. I would figure that if I coppied the content from the first site over to the second site without removing it from the first I might get penalized I would think.

    Thanks for the info everyone. I kind of figured you could do something like that but of course I had never done it so wasn't quite sure.
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  • Profile picture of the author networm
    +1 here for 301 redirects. Google recommends it if you have that kind of situation.
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  • Profile picture of the author Aduley
    I guess my only question is should I keep content on my old domain name or completely remove it to avoid duplicate content.

    Or does Google not even take that into consideration with 301 redirects?
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    • Profile picture of the author RemingtonSteele
      Originally Posted by Aduley View Post

      I guess my only question is should I keep content on my old domain name or completely remove it to avoid duplicate content.

      Or does Google not even take that into consideration with 301 redirects?
      The purpose of the 301 is to notify search engines that a web page has "moved permanently." You can do a 301 in a variety of ways, but one way is to replace the current content of a page with the code that handles the 301 redirect, so that the old content isn't even on the page anymore.

      The reason that you ought to set up the redirects is because those pages on your old domain are probably indexed in Google and elsewhere, and they may have inbound links as well, so if someone were to click on a Google listing or a link somewhere, they would get a 404 ("Page Not Found") error if the page no longer existed and wasn't redirected. In other words, the 301 allows you to avoid broken links, which are "bad" in the eyes of both the search engines and the people who wanted to see the content.

      By setting up the 301 redirects, you don't have to worry about duplicate content, as the content either won't be visible (because you've replaced it with the 301 code), or it will still be there (because you've set up the redirects through .htaccess instead) but it won't be visible to humans or spiders because when a spider or human visits the page, the page will redirect to the new URL before the browser has a chance to render the content on the old page.
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  • Profile picture of the author jhonsean
    301 redirects also is needed for the sites that also have this kind of scenario and it must be use in a right manner.
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  • Profile picture of the author Watch Store
    use 301 re-directs but it make take some time up to a few weeks for Google to show the changes
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  • Profile picture of the author Jeremy Barker
    I did something similar but with a blog. I learned from my mistakes a while ago and deleted a page url name that I had to make a new name that I thought would help me. I copied and pasted all of my content onto the new URL but lost the rankings, etc with the search engines. We all learn from our mistakes.

    I would say if you have a good ranking and status on the search engines and around the net right now, then the redirect would be the best option.
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