I have a site than had an unattractive domain name w/ a PR of 2 & some decent backlinks. We'll call this domain A. I decided to buy a better domain name for that site (domain B), so I redesigned and uploaded all the content that was on domain A to domain B. I just used domain B as a parked domain that forwarded to domain A, so all links would point to the correct places. Now domain B is prettier, but has no pagerank, lower Alexa rankings, etc. Is this duplicate content? What should I do?
another question on this topic... with a 301 redirect, do all the backlinks count that originally pointed to the old website?
Thanks SEORanter Looks like I did it the wrong way though. I'll switch to the 301 tonight. Does anyone know if using the 301 from now on will give my PR a boost? Or at least make it white and not grayed-out?
That will depend entirely on the state of your redirects and backlinks come the next Page Rank update (if the current update completes during August you can expect that update in approximately November given Google's trends).
The 301 redirect basically tells Google that your site has permanently moved, so it might as well start paying attention to the new domain instead of the old one.
Yes, but it doesn't happen overnight. A lot of people "in the know" suggest it can take up to three months for the search engines to sort this out. In my experience, it's been more like a week, give or take, but I've only paid attention to Google. The other search engines really don't matter... The meaning of the 301 status code / error message is that the content has been moved, permanently. You send the new address down with the message, and when a browser asks for the old URL, it gets the 301, and requests the new address. Search bots get the same message, and flag different parts of the database for update. So, the content isn't duplicate, it's just moved, and old links carry over to the new domain. If you change the directory structure, though, you're going to see a lot of 404 / page not found errors. You can redirect those to the right page, but it's easier, if you can, to keep the folder structure from the old site.
Some great points! I didn't mean that the benefits of the redirect would take up to three months to show; I was referring there to PR only. SERPs benefits could happen almost instantly, likely as soon as Google crawls and indexes the full domain of redirects.
definately do the 301 redirect from domain A to domain B. put all the files on the domain B. i've had to do this a lot as well.
SERPs would happen instantly - all of your old SERP rankings are now 301'd to the new page, so the visitor still ends up on your site looking at the content they were after, just a question of if they see domain A in the SERPs or domain B in the SERPs (kind of meaningless if they end up at your site anyways...)
I get the feeling the three months part used to be the case, but the major search engines got their act together. Whenever I've had to use 301s, I saw the effects in the SERPs within a few days. But if you have a lot of links to the old URL from a lot of different sources, it might take longer for all of those to be updated.