Domain switch planned - new domain accessible - until the switch: redirect from new to old domain with 307?

[comicron]

Hi there,

We are going to switch our local domain oldsite.at to newsite.com in November.

As our IT department wants to use the newsite.com already for email traffic till then, the domain newsite.com has to be accessible for public and currently shows the default Apache page without useful content. The old domain has quite some trust, the new domain is a first time registered domain (not known by search engines yet and no published anyhow). The domain was parked till now.

I am aware of the steps to take for the switch itself, but: **what to do with the newsite.com domain until everything is prepared for the switch? **I suppose users or search engines find the domain and as there is no useful information available it harms us already.

My idea was to 307 redirect newsite.com to the oldsite.at but the concern is that this causes problems as soon as we switch the domain and redirecting with 301 from oldsite.at to newsite.com?

Do you have any objections or other recommendations?

Thank you a lot in advance.

[comicron]

Hi Ruth,

Thank you a lot for your input. I think our changes to brand and website will not be that significant as we do not change anything regarding our brand - it will remain the same. Same for the design and content.
I like the idea of collecting email addresses, but I am not sure what to tell them when we switch domains - as there will be nothing new, apart from the domain URL

The major issue what was bothering us was the fact that our main domain was country specific (.at) and we are an internationally operating company. That is why we planned to switch the main domain to a .com.

I will definitely follow your suggestions about some PR before the domain switch and get SEs to crawl the site before the switch.

[RuthBurrReedy]

Andy's suggestion would work just fine - but you might also consider building some kind of landing page for the new site to preview the change (if it won't wreck your brand launch strategy to do so). When we did the switch from seomoz.org to moz.com, we had a page up teasing the new brand and even collected email addresses for our community to be notified when the new site launched. Not only would this solve your current issue, it would also allow Google to start crawling your new site sooner. You could even do some PR to build some links to the new domain in advance of the switch!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

Do you mean create a pre-launch page within your current site? I would prefer to do this myself, but if they are wanting to make use of the new domain to form an e-mail campaign landing page, then as long as it is done nicely, I can see no problem with this.

Best of luck

-Andy

[comicron]

Hi Andy,

Thank you for the quick reply.

So you would suggest to create a simple HTML page for the new domain, noindex it and as soon as we move get the 301 in place? Your suggestion was my second option, but as I thought we are just moving the domain without changing too much of the content/design it is not worth creating a pre-launch page. But I definitely want to get rid of the default Apache page

Thank you and best regards

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

There is no harm in using the new site as a pre-launch kind of thing, but I would be noindexing it until you are ready to make the switch. At that point, remove the noindex and ensure 301's are in place for the move. Without the noindex, it leaves it open for Google to pass judgement on - not something you want on a pretty empty page.

If your IT department just want to use it to form the basis of an e-mail campaign, then just don't try to do any SEO and you will be good. However, at least ensure the page is branded and has some content and a nice page for someone to land on. You don't want an empty Apache holding page with a sign-up form.

-Andy