Hi All I currently manage the following employment website for horse racing www.atrec.com.au however I am in the process of redeveloping the website, and rebranding it as www.racingjobs.com.au as it is more self explanatory and easier to promote and remember. ATREC is currently ranking at the top of google for all things "Racing - Jobs / Careers / Employment etc" so I am currently trying to work out a plan, for transferring the site over to the new domain, without impacting my google ranking. The RacingJobs website, is currently just a parked page, as the new website is still about two weeks away. What I was thinking of doing creating a "Coming Soon Page" with a basic introduction article, that provided some content in the form of keywords. I was then thinking of building up some backlinks to the site, prior to it being launched, to help with its indexing. Once the site is ready to go, I was thinking of running it parallel with the existing site for a few days, as a bit of a soft launch. Once this soft launch is complete, I was going to then redirect the ATREC site to the RacingJobs site. I was also going to ask other websites to change their link from ATREC to RacingJobs. Has anyone ever been in a similar situation and have any advice on what I should or shouldnt be doing, and whether my plans makes sense? Cheers Jake
happens all the time with many people. first, you need to do proper onpage optimization on the new site. pretty much same type of optimization you have on your current one, if not better. keep the site title, description, etc the same along with the type of content if possible. once the development part is done, you can launch the new site and do a 301 redirect from your old domain to the new domain. change as many backlinks as possible to the new site and get new backlinks to the new site at the same time. 301 redirect is permanent redirection so google will know that the old site has moved to a new domian and google will show the same search results for the new domain without any ranking change.
There are no solution could helping you switching from one domain to another without affected your current ranking, at least for a short period of time. The best bet you could do is 301 redirect in both your .htaccess file and give them a note via Google Webmaster Tools could be a big plus in this case.
it can happen whether you like it or not.. 301 is the easiest way to do that.. it might take some time but that's normal.. just continue what you are doing and its going get all things right..
I was in same situation before, here is what I did, works 100% first, I get newdomain to the same IP as olddomain 2. in my IIS, I bind newdomain and olddomain together, two identical site on same IP, what a disaster you might think 3. verify both domain at google webmaster tool. 4. change the canonical meta on each page from olddomain to newdomain 5. change perfer domain at google webmaster tool 6. later, saw google start index the newone and appear in SERP 7. after 1 month, move olddomain to another IP and make 301 8. done
301 the old domain to the new one and begin to get all your links changed over as quickly as possible. That is the smoothest and best way since this way both domains will still work, there will be no broken links.
It would be better if you run both sites, the old site should mention about the migration into new site, until the new one is popular enough...
I think wishbone is right, it’s simpler to leave the first website as it is and start doing the second...one popular, and in a short while if you focus your efforts on the new website you will bring it on good positions in serp...and this way you will have 2 websites in the search engines top.
I would 301 redirect and remove the old site, its a tricky process timing wise but build you new site and maybe use no index to stop google crawling and getting duplicate content, then when you have matched the old site on the new domain, use the .htacess file to redirect to the new site. You may lose rankings for a short time while it gets re-indexed but they'll come back /
If you verify both domains in Google Webmaster Tools you can tell them about the change there And of course use a 301 redirect with appropriate rules so someone looking for a page on the old domain would be redirected to the correct page on the new domain.
As i know 301 redirect which called permanent redirect is a choice for your cases. But why are you going to change your domain? Be sure that people don't memorize name of domain in most cases and they search every time for going to it. So its better not to accept this risk.