We have a site that has been live for about 3 years. It has a long, unweildy domain name, though all true words, no hyphens. Say something like - www . themexicantravelcorporation.com. The person who originally built the site included no Titles or basic seo. Now with titles, basic seo and some directory linking, reciricols, etc, the site is beginning to show up in the keyword tracker for far more phrases and is slowly picking up traffic. We have a new domain - say www.the-mtc.com. For the sake of having a more memorable domian name, easier for visitors to remember and type in, is it worth doing a 301 redirect to the new domain? Would all the recent linking work be rendered useless or not as I am supposing if the incoming link is pointing to the original homepage it would resolve to the new one? What about the sandbox effect on the new domain? Are there any other major cons to redirecting a whole domain?
If you use a 301 redirect then all the links and PR will be transfered to the new domain. I'm not 100% sure that there will be no sandbox effect as I've never done this before with a new domain, though if I had to guess I'd say you'd be okay since the PR and backlinks transfer it would make sense for 'trust rank' to transfer also. If you do 301 redirect make sure you 301 any internal pages to relevent pages on the new domain also, it can be quite time consuming on larger sites.
i agree with matt. i'd be interested to find out if you get sandboxed at all. My guess is that you will for about 2 weeks to 2 months (just a guess).
Geez, re-reading my original post in this thread, I can't believe how sloppy my spelling is. Sorry about that. Blame it on my kids plaguing me when I am trying to post. Anyway, it seems that no-one has any major cons or warnings then? Why is it I have alarm bells going off in my head? I can't get over the feeling that I am missing something. Can anyone who has actually redirected a whole domain to a new domain name - especially an asp, dbase driven site please drop me a PM or post in the thread here just so's I can get over being such a nervous nelly about this?
You should check out mine, that'll make you feel better! 301 redirects on a windows server - look here http://www.internetbasedmoms.com/seo/301-redirect-windows-server.html Sandbox - I'm not sure. Last time we did it I noticed a drop in rankings for a couple of weeks, though I put this down to the length of time that it took for the search engines to sort out the redirects that we had put in place.
i have done 301 for php mysql based site.i have not feeled a mogor drop in ranking .google,yahoo and msn updated my search link quickly within 1 month.but pr i still waiting for it 3 month already.