I'm planning of moving my site to a new domain name. Can anyone please explain the pitfalls and how one can do this without creating seo proplems. I also need to know how I can do this using an htaccess entry for a 103 re-direct. I can't seem to find how that needs to be done. Any help much appreciated. I'm thinking of something like www.domainold.co.za -> www.newdomain.net
You're looking to do a 301 redirect. I would move your content to the new domain name, and then point the old site to the new site. If you are using Cpanel, just go into "redirects" and enter in the information. There are a lot of posts on DF describing all the different methods, depending on your exact situation. The new domain isn't going to show any PR until the next update. If you have a lot of backlinks under the old domain, you will want to keep the old domain pointing to the new - unless you intend on using the old domain for something else.
Well the content doesn't change. I'm only changing my url. Is there a way to do a 301 redirect so if a user types www.olddomain.co.za het goes to www.newdomain.net?
If you want to direct the entire domain, to the new domain index, you can add this to your .htaccess file on the old domain (make sure you make a copy of it) and some hosts don't show the .htaccess file so if don't see it, you want to make sure you don't overwrite it. redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/ If you are trying to direct specific pages on the old domain to specific inner pages on the new domain, it gets more involved and the best method depends on how many pages you are talking about and if mod_rewrite in enabled on your old domain host. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=23044
If you have a lot of links you are going to have a hard time getting everyone to change them to your new domain. Therefore you will probably want to keep the old domain registered for as long as you can. Also doign a 301 will be good for the short term but in teh long term, I have heard, it could hurt youe SERPs. What I did then when I changed domains was do the 301 for about a month and then used a simple meta direct. So far it hasn't hurt my SERPs and they are now where they were before I changed the domains, and I am starting to get traffic from google and am expecting a PR3 at the next update. Pretty good since my site wasn't even indexed by Google for 6 months when I started the site with the old domain