Please help me. Hi - At this point -we have decided to change our domain which has been for last 4 yrs and enjoy rankings for good keywords. Since we are going international, we should move on to the new domain as the original one restricted us to only US. The new site has new content, new branding etc. The question still remains - how do we go about changing domains - Step 1 - just do 301 redirect page by page to new domain and notify it in google webmasters - Step 2 - upload new content slowly once step 1 is completed and the new site comes in SERPs. The question is - how long does step 1 takes for big Google to notice the change and reflect ? I have spent last 45 days in doing major revamp of the site and am very eager to dive into the Step 2 directly. What is recommended? Can I go to step 2 directly - redirect 301 to newly designed pages? Experts, pl help. Thanks a ton.
do migrate the content to the new site and 301 redirect. 301 redirect is always the best option while changing domain name as it keeps the ranking and PR due to this sort of redirect being permanent
You should always remember that there's BIG possibility to lose all old rankings when you redirect to a new domain.
I Thinks you should have to follow the Step 1 - just do 301 redirect page by page to new domain and notify it in Google webmasters. it's will caused the issue for some days that you may Loose your Key Words Ranking and also Page Rank. and Page Rank Comes hopefully after 2 to 3 months when new PR updates is comes. it's better for you to go with step 1.
its not like that really. google recognizes 301 as a permanent redirect so will transfer the ranking and PR
ya , that's true , when i redirect my website to new domain then all the things are same like page rank and backlink.
Thanks guys. 301 is indeed the right way. However, after researching a lot on this - we concluded on - Moving the present site to new one with 301 with NO content change - Once crawled, updating the content.
Yeah!! That's the right way to do a domain change. And, don't forget to let Google know about the change in Google Webmaster Tools.
Just an update - the site was redirected as per the guidelines provided - it is more than a month and the site appears no where. yahoo and bing have crawled and rankings are coming back on new site but Google is still keeping us in the sandbox. Very painful wait - anyone knows how to come out of sandbox.
sorry to hear its still not indexed, i dont have any suggestions other than to say ive enjoyed the info posted in this thread as im away to do a domain change on one of my old sites.
You want to go international - do you provide international services or have content which you want to cross borders. The reason i'm asking is because i've found that it's really hard to rank well in multiple countries at the same time. Targetting different countries means you need to have country specific domains. Anyway, you've changed domains now with a 301 redirect. Has the HTML changed in any way (different html on old domain vs new domain). Depending how much it's changed, you can expect drop in rankings for some time or even never getting back your previous rankings.