301 Redirects and SEO

What a 301 redirect is going to do is notify search engines that a page no longer exists on a URL and it now exists on a new URL. In addition to that, it is going to tell search engines to credit any authority, relevancy, and (most importantly) links to the new destination.

It really depends on any links that Site B has acquired. If a lot of internal pages have acquired good links, then I would do the 301 redirects for those pages. If 99.9% of the links Site B has are pointed at the root domain, I would probably just redirect the whole thing to the root domain of Site A.

I have not worked with 3dcart, so I'm not familiar with the platform, but redirects are usually best handled through the .htaccess file. The .htaccess file is independent of whatever platform you are running on.

Permanent 301 redirect is the best way to make your site page as the best one to consider in terms of passing link juice (search engines) and for the users (original source of information).

The part that caught my eye here was your statement that the old site had a mix of bad links and good ones. If Google is telling the truth, the bad links just get ignored so they won't hurt the site they are being 301'd to. If they aren't as honest as we all would like to believe them to be, 301ing things could do just as much harm as good (although I doubt there is any harm or you would already see it in the original site's rankings).

You also say that there aren't all that many links and that there is practically no domain authority (although there is no tool out there that can reliably make that assessment because it is an invented metric that Google does not use). If that's the case, it really doesn't matter much at all, other than to the smattering of current customers (assuming it is even a site that caters to repeat business).

The rub here is that it is one thing if you are using the same domain for both sites and it is merely a url structure that changes. When they are two completely different domains, you pretty much have to keep both sites live for the 301s to work. You do not have access to the .htaccess file in 3DCart and you can only 301 to the same domain with 3DC, so the original site absolutely cannot remain on that platform if you plan on using 301s. You could move the first site to WordPress and then control the re-directs through a .htaccess file, I guess. Just make sure you make a copy of all the original URLs - especially any that have links.

Of course, if there are that few good links, it might just be easier to contact the linking sites and have them link to the new URLs on the new site. As far as current customers go, you could always just email with the new site location. Otherwise, if you go the 301 route, they'll end up on the new site anyway.

Ugg...I wrote a long reply already but warriorforum sucks on mobile.

Anyway...thank you for the info. Exactly what I needed. Probably will just do a root domain level 301 redirect to new site and revisit any issues later. Thank you!

What a 301 redirect is going to do is notify search engines that a page no longer exists on a URL and it now exists on a new URL. In addition to that, it is going to tell search engines to credit any authority, relevancy, and (most importantly) links to the new destination.

I will also keep it as brief as possible. All that you need to do is implement a 301 redirect. There is no need to redirect individual pages. If you have a 301 in place and someone types bizonline.com then he will be redirected to bizname.com. Similarly, if someone types bizonline.com/products then he will be redirected to bizname.com/products. This will happen though if teh structure of the sites is same.