Redirecting an Old Domain

[Simple_Machines]

One of my clients has a newish e-commerce website that was just redesigned. Part of this new marketing push is shutting down an old yahoo store.

The problem is that this old store's domain has a 10 year old link in DMoz and is there fore in about 200 other directories. Is pointing that old domain at the new website going to be enough to keep all of that link juice flowing?

[ShaMenz]

Hi Mike,

A 301 Redirect must always be implemented on the server where your content originates.

Basically, it is "catching" the request for a page and saying "send this request to this other page". 301 Redirects happen at the page level, not the domain level. So as Malachi said, it is always best to redirect specific page to relevant replacement page if possible.

For you, the solution is slightly different, since your originating content is hosted within the Yahoo! Store system.

This Yahoo! document provides the information you need to implement a 301 Redirect from your store to an external domain (toward the bottom of the page). Look for the heading To add a domain redirect for a domain registered outside of Yahoo!:.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[Simple_Machines]

So if we change the DNS information and point oldsite.com at newsite.com - will those old links in dmoz still work? Since it is a yahoo site, can we even do 301 redirects?

or is that something we would do on our new site?

[malachiii]

Be very consistent with your 301 redirects is my best advice. Last year we did a significant update in terms of content and otherwise to a new domain.  make absolutely sure you're sending as much content to the correct locations on the new domain and you'll be fine.  Avoid the trap of 301ing sub pages to the main domain url as much as possible.

[MarieHaynes]

According to the seomoz guide on redirection: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection, 90-99% of the link juice continues to flow to the new site upon redirection.