Hi everyone, I have a site which is a gaming forum, for girls. The domain is 2 years old. I've just bought a domain from someone, also to do with gaming. As I'm wanting to expand to attracting all gamers to the site and hopefully more traffic. The site I've just bought is 6 years old - both have gamer in the URL. My plan was, to move the forums and content over, to the 6yr old domain and have all pages from the 2yr old site 301 redirected. How much would this affect seo?
If you 301 redirect everything then you should be fine. If anything it will help consolidate all of your links and PR in to one single domain and potentially help your rankings now that you have all of this additional content.
I wouldn't use the 301 redirect. What you can do is keep both sites up for a nice crosslink. Crosslinking is fair game in my book. Adding your link to any webpage is fair play and really efficient for SEO. What you can do is keep both sites active and spend most your time working on the one that is your favorite. Just make the themes slightly different with different useful resources or services.
301 redirect is the way to go - I have done this recently on two high traffic sites due to a company name change. Try and get as many of the existing backlinks as you can changed to the new domain - this caught us out on one of those sites that immediately ranked then dropped in favour of the old domain for several months until we finally managed to get the old pages out of the index. Expect the current toolbar page rank of the newly purchased domain to drop once the ownership transfer is complete. It'll return over time, however.
"Try and get as many of the existing backlinks as you can changed to the new domain" I hadn't thought of that so thanks for mentioning that. What would be the most successful way to 301 redirect. I hear of people it not getting it right, and I don't want to be one of those ones. Both domains are on the same host, dunno if that makes any difference or not, but worth mentioning it, because, my initial idea, was to, change the primary domain so all the files (all 3GB) are already uploaded and means I don't have to take the site down for 2 days while my ISP keeps disconnecting me for downloading and uploading my site Then add the first site as a parked domain, mainly because it worked great for redirection before. But that was completely different and obviously not the way to go about it? .
There are different approaches to do 301, but the easiest would be .htaccess or with PHP if your site structure and skills allows that. Changing the promary domain sounds good, since you are doing a 301, doesnt matter even if both the sites are hosted as an add-on or somewhere else.
What value does the 6 year old domain still have? Are there pages published, inbound links and unique content? I would make sure you have all of the equity of the old domain sent to the new version with 301's, and then move content from your existing domain to the new one and 301 these pages 1 to 1 to maximize the value of your existing pages and the new domain!
I totally agree with "directoryman" Why do not you utilize what you have instead of diminishing it... - You will not damage the online visibility of your 2 years old site - You will get back link power from 2 years old to 6 - You will keep all you indexed pages(on Google, others) from 2 years old....and more........ If I were you I would keep the original site and locate the new one on another server and get link backs from the 2 years old site to 6 years old... PS: Do not create duplicate content.... Good Luck...!