Migration to New Domain - 301 Redirect Questions

[Kenny-King]

My client is migrating their site to a new domain. I just did a big redesign, including URL structure change, and 301s from old URLs to new URLs. Now they want a new name, so we're moving forward with a new domain name.

However, we're going to keep the site on the current domain while we ease customers into the new name. During that time, I'm going to be building links to the new domain name and 301 Redirecting that new one to the current domain name. Then, once we migrate the site to the new domain name, I'm then going to redirect the current domain name to the new domain name.

So, my question(s) is/are:

1. Is the above process the best way to use 301 redirects to to build links to the new domain while we transition everything?
2. Should I (or can I) do 3 redirects from the oldest URLs, to the current URLs then to the new URLs?
3. General question... I can't seem to find this anywhere online, but what is the best practice for what order URLs should be in in the htaccess file?

Thanks!

[Kenny-King]

Hi Tom,

Thanks so much for the thorough answer. Very, very helpful. And thank you for the article about execution order... I've been looking for something like that for a while!

[TomVolpe]

Hi there,

Question 1: I'll come back to that...

Question 2: You can use redirect chains but you shouldn't. Although a desktop browser will redirect through the chain quite quickly (providing there are no mistakes), a mobile browser takes 0.6 seconds to get a connection to a page, so each redirect quickly adds up to poor user experience for any mobile users. And although Google has stated it’s crawler does well to deal with 1 or 2 redirects, it can come across problems with longer redirect chains and you could see your final page not getting crawled from the redirect as it should. Both Yahoo and Bing have stated their crawlers do not perform well when it comes to redirect chains. As you make the transition to the new domain you should update your original redirects to send the visitor to the correct page after the first redirect.

Question 3: Best practise for redirects is to specify the more specific rules first, if you're using regex with redirectmatch or rewrite rule, then you'll want to put them after your more specific oldpage.html to newpage.html, so that the more specific rule is given the chance to match before the regular expression is given a more broad chance to match. And finally add an 'if all else fails' rule at the bottom to redirect all requests that were not dealt with by a previous directive.

There's a nice post here on execution order in your htaccess if you'd like to give it a read:http://www.adrianworlddesign.com/Knowledge-Base/Web-Hosting/Apache-Web-Server/Execution-order

Back to Question 1:

If you're choosing not to follow Daniels advice and make the change all at once, you can 301 the new sites backlinks into the existing site, and 301 the old URL structure to the new URLs. But when you do implement the change, you'll want to modify all of your existing redirect to point to the final page the user should end up at, and not force them through a maze of redirects. Then you can then just remove the redirect from the new site, and have those users land on the pages the new links you built are pointing at. Don’t forget Google takes time recrawl, index and ‘trust’ new redirects and attribute all PR and SEO juice to the correct pages.

If at any point you plan on having the same content live on both domains without a redirect in place it would be best practise to use the rel=canonical link attribute in your to signal to google which is the preferred version on content to show in SERPs.

Hope that helps give a bit more information,

Tom

[Kenny-King]

The plan has been thoroughly thought out and definitely needs to be implemented... that's why I came to this forum to ask a technical question. The branding issue has already been resolved.

It's a technical question because it's specifically about 301 redirects and the best practices when implementing them in this particular situation.

Thanks for your advice, but it didn't answer my question.

[DanielFreedman]

Ummm, this isn't what you asked....

...but is it out of the question to re-consider this:

"However, we're going to keep the site on the current domain while we ease customers into the new **name."**This is a mistake, IMHO,  and you should do everything possible to persuade the client to re-think the plan.

Best practice, as I'm sure you know, is to do page-level redirects from each page on the old site to its closest corresponding page on the new site.

Is the company name changing...or just the domain name?

In any event, I can't see an elegant way of doing what you propose...only of mitigating the damage and confusion that will inevitably result.

I'm sure others, more technically knowledgable than I, can weigh in on damage control. But why damage yourself at all?

I don't think this is really a technical  SEO issue at all.

It's a fundamental marketing and branding issue, IMHO. So much better to zoom up to 30,000 feet and address the larger issue.

**Bottom line: the way to make the change is, well, to make the change! All at once. **