I have a subdomain that ranks #1 at Yahoo and top 10 at MSN. I would like to do a redirect and point it to a whole domain. (I mean, instead of being a subdomain I want it to be a domain). If I do that, will my rankings stay the same? How long will it take for the subdomain to vanish and the domain to start showing up at the engines? Any comments are apreciated.
Fryman, I'm redirecting about a dozen pages on one domain (changed extension from .cfm to .asp and want only the .asp pages indexed). Google quickly picked up the new .asp pages and, by and large, dropped the old .cfm pages. There are 2-3 of the old pages left, but without title or description. The most crucial aspect was that the PR5 of the old pages didn't transfer to the new pages, which are now PR0. Not that Google is an issue for you, so here's the Yahoo! and MSN experience. MSN - quickly picked up the new pages, indexing them and dropping the old ones. However, the minimal rankings I had with the old pages are gone entirely with the new (this wasn't important to me as I HAD to change over to .asp and the keywords targeted were "minor" in the scheme of things). Yahoo! - picked up the new pages and kept the old ones....then changed "her" mind and dropped the new pages and left the old ones. Still waiting on this...VERY strange behavior. It's about 10 days and counting for my 301 "experiment", but I had almost nothing to lose with this. I figured I'd lose some rankings/traffic, but no big deal because of the minor keywords/traffic involved. Bottom line - it's probably risky, and I wouldn't expect things to be "back to normal" for at least 2 weeks and maybe more after doing the 301 redirect. If you can avoid it, I would.
It is a single page, just a landing page I created for some satellite radios promotion. It is only a few weeks old, so it has PR0 and no ranks at Google. I want to change it to a domain because when the current program I am promoting ends I guess this could be a very good way to send targeted visitors to an e-bay auction of satellite radios, for example. Since I don't live in the USA I can't be an Ebay affiliate the best thing would be to just sell the domain to someone that can take advantage of it. I will go domain-hunting now... geez, I really hate this, it will be almost impossible to find a decent domain for satellite raidos that isn't already registered...
Fryman, when I moved my blog from a subfolder of a PR4 site to it's own brand-new domain, Google took 2 weeks to pick-up on the 301s and re-index the 30/40 pages. There are still a few old links in Google after 3/4 months and, like Canton, without title or description, but these have been slowly disappearing. However, I had one traffic-pulling KWT that was a steady #2/#3 in Google drop to the third page and it's never recovered its position since the day of the re-index. Whether this was due to the domain move or other factors, I don't know, but it's a risk I will avoid next time by planning well in advance
I couldn't care less about Google. It can take me a year to get out of the sandbox and start getting a good rank for a site, while MSN and Yahoo do it in a couple of weeks. I was lucky enough to find a greatdomain for it and I'm waiting for it to propagate before I do the redirect and change my current links to it.
I've had trouble with Yahoo on 301 redirects in the past. Almost as if they didn't understand them. Not sure if this has been rectified. Not sure on MSN. Lever, good info on the kw drop. I've wondered about this myself. I'm contemplating combining two domains into one "super domain" in the next month or so.