Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Moving A Site

Posted by Anonymous on 1/4/2011 at 2:14 PM ET 500 Points
I am moving a site in two ways.

1) We have two domains (chaney-ent.com and chaneyenterprises.com). The are currently pointing to the same place and behave the same. I'd like to stop search engines from indexing chaney-ent.com, but I don't want to take it away because there's weird places out there that have the old domain name linked to us.

How can I kill the chaney-ent to search engines in favor of the chaneyenterprises.com and not lose the legacy traffic?

2) I have old *.html urls, but they have all gone away. They all have equivelant pages (oldpage.html is noe newpage.cfm) Is there a way not to lose that old traffice and send it to the right place? We have a database of old urls and new urls, can we just do a page404.cfm files that read the path info and redirects to the new place?

Thanks!
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by excellira on 1/4/2011 at 3:05 PM Accepted
    If chaney-ent.com is a mirror (including file names) of chaneyenterprises.com then do a domain forward via 301 (permanent) redirect to chaneyenterprises.com.

    Check the headers when you do this to ensure that you have a true 301 not a 302 (default, temporary).

    The domain forward can likely be done at the registry or you can set it up on the server (on a *nix box you'd do it in the main .htaccess file).

    There will be some loss of PageRank with a redirect but it is the better approach. Currently you may have a serious duplicate content issue.
  • Posted by excellira on 1/5/2011 at 11:08 AM Accepted
    Because of Twitter we've been advising that clients canonicalize on the non-www URL, eliminating 4 characters in the process. This may not be an issue in your case since your domain is longish, but it is a consideration.

    There is some PR (PageRank) leakage when implementing a redirect so you want to make the choice that will least impact the site so before making a decision to canonicalize on www or non www you'd want to take a look at your link profile so that you can make an educated decision.

  • Posted by excellira on 1/5/2011 at 10:51 PM Accepted
    "I wouldn't bother to do 301 redirects for each page. The engines are already confused."

    This is the reason you should do a redirect. The redirect eliminates the confusion by canonicalizing on the correct domain. However, you want to do a domain forward or redirect structured such that when a user attempts to access a given page (say https://example.com/some-page) they are redirected to the correct domain (say, http://correct-example.com/some-page). You do not want to forward all pages to the new home page.

    "Also, I'd check to see which domain is currently ranking for your keyword phrases"

    This is good thinking.

    "Keyword meta tags in place"

    Meta keyword provides no ranking value. Not worth the effort. The meta description is vital to clickthroughs on the search results pages. They should be implemented.

    You can see the indexation in Webmaster tools and in search (Google for example) by utilizing the "site:" advanced operator. Your query would be site:example.com.





  • Posted by excellira on 1/5/2011 at 11:32 PM Accepted
    If you feel it is acceptable to lose rankings and indexation during a transition then I'd say that is an acceptable approach. However, it's contrary to the objectives of most sites.

    I also disagree on the keyword tag. Yahoo is toast and the value the keyword tag may have provided is insignificant in relation to the business intelligence that is given away to competitors by implementation on the tag.

    So, while we respectfully disagree, we'll let stripp make the decisions. :-)
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