Hey guys, Is it possible to change my sites domain whilst keeping my old domains email addresses active, and avoid a hosting set up that google would deem as 'duplicate content' & knock my rank for? ie: -One site hosted under multiple domains -Multiple domains pointing towards one site I read about a 301 Redirect but have a feeling this only works by duplicating content online. My webmaster has given me a number of hosting options/setups but they all involve either deleting the old mail accounts completely or creating 'duplicate content' online. Please bare with me if any of this sounds misinterpreted, I'm a newb.. many thanks 4 ur anwers,
I'm not exactly sure what you're after... if your goal is to move your site to a different domain and still have your email hosted on your existing domain, you could accomplish this by pointing the second domain name to your existing hosting account as an alias, and then utilizing an .htaccess or other measure to determine if they incoming request is for the new or old domain name, and redirect it to the new domain name if needed. Something similar to this might work if using .htaccess: # Redirect from olddomaincom to newdomain.com RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain\.com RewriteRule (.*) http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=permanent,QSA,L] # Redirect from www.example.net to www.example.com RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.olddomain\.com RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=permanent,QSA,L] Code (markup):
Hey Andy, thanks.. My goal it get rid of my old domain completely, but still allow it's incoming mail for clients who don't have the new email address yet. This old mail box would then be checked & replied to periodically, whist being phased out. I want to effectively have mailboxes for both the old domain and new domain for the time being.. Does any of the method you mentioned involve hosting duplicate sites/pointing multiple domains to one site, or do anything that Google would penalize the site for? Still trying to grasp all this..
Hello, Google will not penalize a 301 redirect for duplicate content. It would be viewed as the new source for content and crawled as such. You will however need to keep the old domain pointed to the server in order to use the old email accounts. They have a great article about this as well as video on the Google Webmaster tools page at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633