Hi, I own a domain that provides a free online service that gets a lot of traffic mainly from search engines. In about a month I'm launching a completely new paid service at this domain, and the free service will not be featured, and barely mentioned. Yet, I do not want to just throw away this free traffic, users, extra revenue, etc... I want to move the site at the main domain to free.domain.com. I plan on putting up a new entry page for the next month saying that the free service is moving to free.domain.com and redirecting the users, while at same time announcing the upcoming paid service. This should take care of the users, but I'm not so sure this will take care of the search engines. I rank very well for certain keywords, and I'm afraid I will loose all of this traffic. Anyone have any suggestions? Regards, Wyatt
You will have to 301 redirect the old pages to the new pages on your sub-domain, you will see a drop in rankings for a short period of time, this is common. Below is an example of what to use in your .htaccess file to 301 redirect one page to another. Redirect 301 /path/to/file/oldhtmlfile.html http://sub.new.com/new.html Do not add the http://www to the old file, just the directory path to it. Insert this in your top level htaccess file.