How Would You Solve This SEO Problem? This problem comes from a real-life experience The Set Up: You have a client with a site say that enjoys relatively highly indexed pages and aged over 10 years with backlinks. It holds a PR4 value and does well, but not exceptional, for a number important keywords. Lets call this site: FloridaBusStops.net About 5 years ago, the client picked up the .com version of the name: so he now also has: FloridaBusStops.com The client has pointed both domains to the same web server so that they both host the exact same content, but markets the .COM version exclusively. The .COM site achived some SE success and ranks slighty behind the .NET in a number of cases. It even out-ranks the .net site for a number of keywords. The goal is to get the the .COM to rank highly since it is the site that is being actively marketed. How would you aproach this one keeping in mind that you want to keep the juice from the successful .net site from the good backlinks and indexing, but basically forward all prominence to the .com site. What aproach would you take? The solution I implimented was successful. Details to follow!
Easy. Move the content on the .net to the .com an 301 redirect everything over from the old domain/pages to their new location. Preferably right after a toolbar PageRank update.
Keep in mind that the .net has many valuable back links.. it is DMOZ listed for example. Is 301 still the best solution?
Yep. It's like putting in a change of address notification with the post office and all the places you get your mail from - without the worry of losing anything important.
But can you really keep track of all the places you are getting your mail from? I mean do you really want a DMOZ link pointing to a 301 redirect?
Well, I limit where my mail comes from (magazines, friends and family, bills that have to be paid) so yeah, I can. As for DMOZ, well the best you can do is inform them that the site has moved and ask them to update the listing.
301 is your solution. Nowadays you can inform google explicitly about change of address with webmaster tools.
OK, well here is what i did. Im not going to claim it is the best possible method, but it did achieve some positive results. (hard to truely judge since I was also engaged in other SEO activities on the site) My first step was to update all the internal links from relative urls to abosolute urls pointing explicitly to the .COM content. After a week or so, the .COM site started to creep up towards the .NET site rankings. I then seperated the applications, .NET and .COM to two different web applications, so that they were pointing to two different versions of the same basic site (previously they were literally configered to point to the same directory on the web server) I then used a php (the site is done in php) 301 redirect on MOST of the content pages, exluding the home page, some menu pages and ANY PAGES with Quality Deep Links that I could not get updated. So the end result is a live updated site on .COM and some archived pages and 301 redirects on .NET Im not sure if this was the best aproach but i really didnt want to lose the good inbound links on the .NET site so i basically kept those pages up in a skeleton of what once was a the site and of course all linking back to .COM (menu and links), with the remainder of the .NET site 301redirecting to .COM The end result was a nice increase in the .COM, and some loss in the .NET rankings. However, the .COM is now higher than the .NET ever was (though there were many other SEO activities involved) I like that we also have the .NET as a place to add content and do some off site (off .COM) SEO work pointing back to the .COM Did I make a good choice? Or could it have been done better with complete 301 redirects?