My client has a website hosted on homestead.com. He wants me to first optimize the website(do all SEO work) and then to redesign the site and take it off homestead. But there will be a slight change in the domain name. Like if it is www.mysite-usa.com now, after redesigning it would be www.mysite-us.com. My question is, would it be of any use to do the optimization on the previous site? Also, both the sites would be exactly same, only difference being in the URL. So is it fine from the search engine's point of view or will they consider them as duplicate domains? If yes, is there any disadvantage? Any chance that they will get banned from the search engines?
301 redirect old URLs to their new URLs is the proper way of moving forward with what your doing, failure to do so would be a failure on the services being rendered. You should already know this before taking on clients and effecting peoples revenue sources.
thnx for your help. I didn't knew that he even wants a change in domain name. Came to knew yesterday only and told him this thing at that particular time only. Just wanted to confirm if there is any other way out also.