Greetings, My name is Travis Walters. I am currently developing a real-estate website for my client Luke Bouman. We have been developing everything on a seperate domain called realestate-holland.com. Our actual domain is going to be lukebouman.com. We are worried about losing PR during the switch. My client has all has SEO linking to lukebouman.com/index.html. However, we are using coldfusion so our home page is going to be lukebouman.com/index.cfm. Is there anyway we can redirect the user without hurting our PR? We are planning to switch within two days so any quick advise will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!!!!! Sincerely, Travis Walters
Why do you think page rank is all that important to a real estate site? unless you're selling links, SERP is what you should be concerned about
Hello again, I was just wondering if something like this would work... http://www.realestate-holland.com/index.html This would redirect the user to the following url after 5 seconds: http://www.realestate-holland.com/index.cfm It uses this meta tag here: <META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="5;URL=index.cfm"> I have done this for all webpages on his old site so they point to the new improved pages. By the way, can you even use .htaccess with a Windows server? I thought this was for Linux only? Forgive my ignorance in this matter as I know minimal about this file. Thanks in advance for any advice. Sincerely, Travis Walters
Both suggestion is only partially correct. To keep your ranks (PR and SERP) you should use 301 redirect. You can use mod-rewrite with or without 301 redirect. You can also meta-redirect with or without 301 redirect (The above example is not 301 redirect). For your case 301 redirect is a MUST, imo. Because you are basically "moving" your "building". 301 redirect could be done many ways: meta tag, mod-rewrite, php rewrite,, asp, jsp, etc (don't know about cold fusion though). Google it to find the code.
Hey there, There are two different things going on here so I am a little confused. Let me break everything down into parts. Then, perhaps people can offer better advice. 1. The domain www.lukebouman.com is where everything will be stored. It is where my client had his initial website. The domain www.realestate-holland.com is where the new website currently is. I just want to make sure this is clear 2. Pages are indexed in google and yahoo for both websites. Google webmasters has a utility where you can delete pages from their index. Yahoo has something very similar. MSN is not really an issue since hardly anything is indexed there on realestate-holland.com. 3. I found the code to do a coldfusion 301 redirect: <CFHEADER statuscode="301" statustext="Moved Permanently"> <CFHEADER name="Location" value="http://www.lukebouman.com/"> Below are the questions I have about this information: 1. This question refers to the realestate-holland.com domain. After the transfer, would it be easier to delete the indexed pages from google and yahoo using the webmaster tools? Then, I could rewrite the robots.txt file so crawlers do not crawl those pages. What implications would this have for realestate-holland.com? The duplicate content issue would be taken care of correct? Because it would be uncrawlable, I am assuming these pages would be dropped from the index AND we would lose any PR from the realestate-holland.com website. 2. This question refers to the lukebouman.com domain. There are many pages on the website currently that are HTML files and not coldfusion CFM files. I was using the meta redirect to point to the correct locations. So there will be an index.html page on the lukebouman.com website that will transfer the user to the index.cfm page. Do I need a 301 redirect on the HTML files on the lukebouman.com website as well? I apologize for all the confusion. We did not explain ourselves clearly. I hope this message will help with the confusion. My client has worked very hard for what PR he has so I want to make sure he does not lose it. Thank you all once again for any information you can provide me with. Any clarification on these matters will be greatly appreciated. Sincerely, Travis Walters
Yes you would. if you delete them from the webmaster tools your PR is gone. The answer has been given to you a few times now. You need to do a 301 redirect until google "finds" the new URL's - then you can delete them if you wish. Doing so before you do the 301 you will lose your PR entirely. Period.
I won't put the block on robots.txt. I would allow every robots and visitors to visit the old site but 301 redirect them for each and every page. That way you could retain the ranking. Blocking with robots.txt could erase the ranking if done unwisely. Then after the new site ranks the same or higher than the old one, you could erase the old one. If that is considered as a "moving from the old building" then yes, 301 them.