I have a friend with an authority website on cats that's been around for ten years. The site was started at a free host with a subdomain, and she eventually upgraded to paid hosting with the same company, but kept the sub domain. Now she has come across some problems with her current hosts and wishes to move to a new host with a domain. The site is PR 5 and gets thousands of visitors from Google a day, so she can't afford to lose her rankings. She already has had a domain registered for 8 years now that redirects to her subdomain site. How can she move her site without losing her ranking? My idea was to create an exact copy of the site on the new host, and then put a 301 redirect on every page to point to the corresponding page at the new host. Will that work, or will it get her a duplicate content penalty?
301 redirect is the best method, but you will lose your organic traffic and search engine position for a short period of time, this always happens and there is no way around it.
Can't she park the subdomain (change the DNS) to the new host? Or is this a subdomain that belongs to the free host and the DNS cannot be changed? If yes, I would maybe try contacting the free hosting company and would ask them to make an exception - to be able to move away, explain them the problem.
well, this is really a sensitive subject, but yu can be sure that there is no way to move without any damages, there will be some damages, at least for the short term, it's really a hard decision, especially when you own a BIG authority website, if it was a small website, you just do a 301 redirect and contact your links partners/providers to change the urls of your links (you got only a few anyway), but if you have a leading site.. it will take sometime before you get all your rankings back, but overall if there is a problem and moving is the only solution, then go for it. i can give you some tips about moving sites but someone did cover the subject pretty well so i'll just give you the link: watch this video you may find it usefull: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hKLERasd_k good luck!