I have a domain name with a large site on it. We do pretty good in the Adsense arena but have taken a large hit toward the end of 2005 and outside of that have remained pretty steady. At one point we had around 1.5 million pages indexed on Google and now onyl aroudn 85,000. Google is, sadly, our life and blood. The problem we are facing is the name of the site puts us into a box for which we are trying to expand from. We must change to a new name moving forward and trying to figure out the best way to do this without slaughtering our adsense revenue and Google ranking and what not. With possible curses associated with redirects, duplicate content on multiple domains and a host of other no-no's in the SEO world, how does one tip-toe around the bad mojo and begin anew? Different scenerios I can come up with. 1) Alias the new domain over the old domain. Rebrand the site under the new name, keep everything in its same location, submit indexes to Google and wait for Google to index the new domain. This way, the olddomain.com still displays pages (without redirects) and newdomain.com still displays pages rediects. Once the index appears to be on par with the old domain, start redirecting the old domain pages to the new url and then let Google do the cleanup work through attritian. 2) Lock down the old domain forums and put links on all pages to their respective counter-part on the new domain. Submit index to google and wait for the index to build on the new domain to that of the old domain. After all appears well, start the redirect process to the new domain. How much does duplicate domains for a single site effect you (from an adsense and Google index perspective) and at what point make this more or less obvious. Im sure using the same IP address would be a big give-a-way, but will google really know and how long will it take for it to become obvious that is what is happening? I realize PR is going go through the tubes and will do our best to get those linking to us to change the URL to the new domain. I don't suppose Google would do anything nice like changing your domain in their index to your new domain?
I made the mistake of using a free hosting site for a site that took off. We were exceeding bandwith and being shut down at end of each month. At end of Dec. had to bite the bullet and move site. With no access to .htaccess file on old host have really suffered on indexing. Have disallowed robots on old site but have yet to get the site well indexed on new site. Indexing on old site will disappear and reappear but positioning keeps falling in serps.