My company has a huge site. www.xyz.com it’s a 7/10PR and ranks really well. They are redesigning the entire site. They want to make a whole new site called www.icomm.com or some other very generic name that I advised them against. We also told them that this site will have no rankings at all and a braind new domain name and will take years to get where www.xyz.com is today. They want a new name and an entire new look and content (same business though) let’s just call the new name www.icomm.com In your opinion what is the best way to go about deploying a new site and still trying to hold onto most of the the original sites seo gains? These are the two options I’ve narrowed it down to, maybe there’s a better solution. 1) make a completely new www.icomm.com site and do 302 redirects from the old pages until the new pages are indexed and then 301 redirects (on every corresponding www.xyz.com page) 2) completely redesign the www.xyz.com site with the www.Icomm.com look – keep all the page names the same and do a domain alias for www.icomm.com which would mean when someone types in www.icomm.com they are redirected to the www.xyz.com site but the url in the address bar still shows up as www.icomm.com. Also, when people go to www.xyz.com or hit an old link it takes them to the www.xyz.com address and shows up as the new www.icomm.com site. This way the site keeps its power and PR right? If a site is completely redesigned, new content, images all of that can that cause ranking problems once google hits it again and sees it’s completely changed? Wouldn't that be like a shock to the system? I've read so many different conflicting opinions and this is pretty important, so i thought i'd ask you guys. There's a lot of smart people in here! Thanks in advance!
I'd go with number 2. But I'm really not sure of what Google will do. Why do you have to make a new website, anyway? Can't you just redesign it and stick with the domain name? It already has a PR of 7, too.
If icomm.com has the different content from the first one, I think it's better to use a different name and keep the previous one. Redesigning xyz.com though will not lose traffic in the near future, it will lose later. For me I will keep xyz.com the same, and start a new site of icomm.com.
I agree with this opinion. 302 are dangerous. 301 aren't so, but still it is better to keep content at existing domain, otherwise you would experience drop in rankings as reported at WMW.
I'd go with option (1) however use 301 redirects from the start. Generate a URL redirect list and whack it in your htaccess or IIS.