What should be the best way to redirect for SEO?

i currently run a website at www.advancespeedshop.com using a different shopping cart. we are currently considering moving to a more improved shopping cart, but by doing so majority of the links will be altered as well as the domain name being changed to www.advancespeed.com.

the site as it is right now ranks pretty well for being up just 2 years. i'm afraid by redirecting people to the newer site would just be SEO suicide.

here were the options that i was thinking:
1) keep the site as it is, and just start a new shop
2) redirect people from www.advancespeedshop.com (all links) to www.advancespeed.com

which would be the better way granted the newer shopping cart will be definitely improved and more user friendly.

 

301 the old links to the new links. You won't lose anything. I've done it plenty of times. Just make sure the content is pretty much the same or exact. Google will recieve the 301 when it comes crawling, throw it back in the list of pages to index and make the change. I promise you won't suffer in the serps. For more info, go to Matt Cutts blog and take a look....straight from the horses mouth.

If you need to know how to 301 or have any questions, let me know and I wil give you some tips to save you time.

*EDIT- PLEASE KEEP THE QUESTIONS IN THE PUBLIC THREAD , NOT PM, SO THAT ANYONE CAN BENEFIT FROM IT

 

301 redirection is the best & permanent way to redirect your url without any lost

 

Both domain names are quite long for me. maybe that is needed to be shortened somehow.
Agree 301 redirect is wwhat you need but try to work on the domain name length as well

 

You are after a 301 redirect mate

Make sure you forward all of your URLs to the correct new paths

 

301 redirect, you can actually set it in your hosting account.

 

Just a single line code is enough for this problem

It's here http://www.codbox.net/freecodes.html

 

I would suggest that you keep your old domain name. Starting over w/ a new domain simply to drop the word "shop" out of it is probably not that wise. You are chancing getting sandboxed and losing any credit for domain age that the current site might currently be benefiting from.

The other posters are correct that any old URLs that are no longer valid should be 301 redirected to the new URL whose content most closely resembles the content of the old URL, although I would question why you are worried about checkout pages ranking. Typically, these are not content URLs that would show up in the search engines when people are searching for something. If you are running on Apache then you have several utilities you can use to accomplish the 301s including Mod Rewrite.

 

Could anyone tell me whether the scheme according to which links to a redirected site get distributed, if that is an understandable way to put it. I mean, let us assume I have an old site and I want to drop it for a new one. The old site has accumulated a bulk of links, including ones pointing at internal pages. If my new site has a completely different structure, where do the links end up pointing at?

 

If the content is the same, then no matter the structure you would redirect to the exact page or the most similar. This technique won't really work if the S.E.'s feel that the content is different. Be careful and don't abuse it...use it wisely.

example

Page x is about Blue Bird Cages and it is a main menu item on DOMAIN A
301 redirect to:
Page x on the new domain has blue bird cages on a deep submenu....all link juice that is driven to the orig. page will be passed.

 

I want to add to this:
"Our tests and public statements from search engineers have made us reasonably certain that 301 redirects deplete between 1% and 10% of link juice. This is an acceptable penalty if it is necessary to make one URL lead to another URL and other options are unavailable."

That is from SEOmoz.org blog on best practices (post nofollow business). So I guess you will lose a little juice, but if you can live with that-- youre good to go.

 

thanks a lot everyone. 301 was what i was thinking of doing but we may now just consider running a separate site to make things easier on ourselves

 

As everyone says just do a 301 redirect... Its pretty easy

 

What if you want to move the same content to a different URL?
What is the best way as to not loss pr ranking?

 

The First Option is Good but requires efforts and Time

If you want to go for second option then consider 301 Redirect for permanent Redirection or 302 Redirect for Temporarily redirection in case u may like to come back for your first site.

But You better hire Some SEO Expert or SEO Company as he may be able to do better and save job for you.

Best of Luck