Hi All, The title pretty much sums up my question. I've got a delux hosting account over at Godaddy with two domain names. My client had a .biz with a PR2. I told him to register a .com domain for better SEO. The new domain has a couple of his keywords in it as well. I created a subfolder off his root hosting called _sites. This is where all of his other domain will be hosted from. Under the sites folder I've created another folder for his new domain and pointed the new domain to that folder. I plan on making his old domain which is a PR2 a gateway page to his new domain with a link. Will this hurt his new website? Will Google flag this for being from the same IP? I know there's probably a simple answer to this question. I just wanted to get it clarified by some experts. Thanks, Joe
You probably share an IP with 20 other sites, many of which are scummier than scum. It's the nature of shared hosting. If your sites are on different domains, Google doesn't have any way to know they're under the same account. As for the domain transition, you should just have each of the pages from the .biz doman 301 over to the corresponding .com pages.
The TLD extension for the domain name has no impact on your site's SEO. Google and other engines see .com and .biz as equals from an SEO perspective. However, users may see the .com as more legitimate. So your click-thru-rate in the SERPs will likely be a little better should it actually rank. As smallpotatoes indicated, your are better off 301 redirecting each URL on the old site to the URL on the new site whose content most closely resembles the content at the URL on the old site. This will transfer credit for any inbound links to the old site over to the corresponding URL on the new site as well as remove the old site from the index (at least at Google it will remove them).
Thanks guys for the input. So let me get this straight, if I 301 ALL of his old pages to the new domain, Google won't penalize the site for duplicate content? Do the html files need to have the same name? I've changed a few of the files names on the new site. Thanks for the input!
Correct... And it doesn't matter that the page name has changed. You can give them any new location, and life will be good.