Changing URL...How Keep Ranking for Old += for New

[cinhol]

Hello Everyone -

I have a client that is changing the name of their company from NameA to NameB.

We currently have a website domain name of www.NameA.com and will be changing to www.NameB.com . All the content will remain the same except for changing the company name wherever it appears in the text.

They want to continue getting ranking on Google for people searching on NameA�which is when you search on NameA, www.NameA.com is the first listing and interior pages of the website are also listed, as an indented set, with it.

They want to get similar ranking for NameB on google, while maintaining the ranking of NameA. Is this possible?

My understanding is that I can put a .htaccess file in the root directory of www.NameA.com (which is an IRM by the way, so maybe not?) with the content:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.NameB.com/$1 [R=301,L]

and that will keep and transfer the ranking that exists now for NameA to NameB, (please let me know if I don�t understand this correctly) but I don�t know how to accomplish what they are asking for.

Any advise from you all would be greatly appreciated!!!

Thank you Extra Much!

Cindy

[Matt]

Cindy,

A 301 redirect should help you transfer PageRank, but I've heard others say you should only 301 a small set of pages and let Google pick up the rest.

I may be misunderstanding, but for clarification, you're not going to be able to transfer ranking from A->B and have both ranking well. You're going to run into the duplicate content penalty.

You also need to consider how many 3rd party sites are linking back to www.NameA.com and determine how many of those links you can get updates to www.NameB.com.

-Matt

[cinhol]

Matt �

Sorry for the late response�my email address was wrong in my forum account and I didn�t realize you had responded.

Thanks for your guidance!

So base on what you said, I will try to do a 301 Redirect using a .htaccess file and hope that the Ranking will get transferred from the old domain name to the new domain name.

We will be taking down the old domain name once the new one becomes known.

So to recap:

I am changing the domain name of an existing website. All content will remain the same.

Existing domain: www.NameA.com
New domain: www.NameB.com

Lets say I have 5 pages that make up website NameA but I will do a redirect of 2 of them and the complete URL path to each is:

www.nameA.com/index.htm
www.nameA.com/images/gallery.htm

Website NameA is currently hosted as an IRM on FutureQuest.

I will set up a new (additional) IRM on FutureQuest for the website NameB, and put all my pages in this new IRM. For as long as necessary I will maintain hosting of website NameA.

To do a page to page redirect for these 2 pages do I do the following?

1. Create a file named .htaccess
2. Contents of .htaccess file:
redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.NameB.com/index.htm
redirect 301 /images/gallery.htm http://www.NameB.com/images/gallery.htm
3. Put the .htaccess file in the root directory of website NameA (the directory on FutureQuest that www.NameA.com points to)

Also, should I basically empty the contents (but keep the pages) for website NameA to avoid the duplicate content penalty or do I need to keep the contents for a while?

Thanks so much for your help!

Cindy

[JP2112]

This sounds similar to what I'm planning to do with my site. I am moving all my content to site B, downgrading site A to an IRM and using .htaccess redirect to point all traffic to the new domain.

You will probably see a dip in search engine traffic after the 301. It should return after they adjust to the change.

I'm confused about Matt's advice, I've never heard that you should 301 only a few pages, if anything that would confuse the web spiders. You want them to understand that all of your pages have moved. The rewrite rule you described in your first post will redirect all requests for site A to the equivalent page on site B.

If you have a sitemap you should consider regenerating it (after moving the site) and submitting it to Google, Bing, etc, to make sure they are on the same page.

Also, you should 'retire' the original domain name, but never give it up because someone else will register it. You also never know how many old links will remain 'in the wild' and you want those to continue to redirect to your new site for as long as possible.

[cinhol]

JP2112 -

Thanks for your help!

You are right, per Google Website Tools help, they say do ALL pages, so that is what I will do.

And the site map to search engines is a good idea, thank!

Cindy

[cinhol]

JP2112 -

Do I remove the content from my original pages to avoid duplicate content?

Thanks!

Cindy

[Matt]

Do I remove the content from my original pages to avoid duplicate content?

With your .htaccess file, it shouldn't be possible to view the original content without being redirected, so I don't see that it matters (this content will go away at some point anyway, right?

2. Contents of .htaccess file:
redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.NameB.com/index.htm
redirect 301 /images/gallery.htm http://www.NameB.com/images/gallery.htm

If you only have a handful of pages, this should be fine, but if you have a lot of pages, you'd want a wildcard redirect (provided the new page names are identical, which it appears they are).

You are right, per Google Website Tools help, they say do ALL pages, so that is what I will do.

Based on the additional information provided, I would agree in this case (small number of pages). Redirecting a subset of total pages is intended for sites with thousands of pages and may be designed to reduce the number of redirect calls being placed on the server.

As a follow-up, let us know how well your PR transfers.

-Matt

[cinhol]

Matt -

Thanks again for your help!

If I put the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.NameB.com/$1 [R=301,L]

in my .htaccess file will that have the same end result as doing

redirect 301 /file1.htm http://www.NameB.com/file1.htm
redirect 301 /file2.htm http://www.NameB.com/file2.htm
etc.

I tried it out and it is working great, but wanted to make sure the Search Engines are getting the correct info. It's a lot less work, so I am hoping so!

Thanks!

Cindy

[Matt]

At a glance, that looks correct (but don't take my word for it). Google webmaster tools is very helpful for diagnosing any cases where the redirect might be resulting in a 404 or other error.

-Matt

[JP2112]

Originally Posted by cinhol

JP2112 -

Do I remove the content from my original pages to avoid duplicate content?

Thanks!

Cindy

The 301 should permanently redirect the spiders to the new content. The old content should eventually disappear from search results. You can leave your old content up, but do you really want to pay for hosting charges for it? I'm downgrading my soon-to-be old site to an IRM package which keeps the domain name and the .htaccess redirect, but without the ongoing hosting fees for a site that I don't want to be found any more.