Redirecting my new Website URL to my old Website URL

[Shopadorn]

Hi!  OK, I am semi - new to SEO Moz  but have been self-teaching for 3 years.  However I am stuck.. I have been operating my e-commerce site from www.shopadornonline.com for the past 3 years.  I just purchased www.shopadorn.com

Right now Shopadorn.com re-directs to www.shopadornonline.com because all my products and links go to shopadornonline.com/productblahblahblah

I guess I am stuck.  Not sure what to tell my web designer to do?  Do I give up on having shopadorn.com OR do I start re-directing customers and doing 301 re-directs?

I think from what i have read that it is bad to have traffic going to both shopadorn and shopadornonline as they compete for rankings?

Where should I start?

[j0a0vargas]

I can not understand the difficulty of the web designer. Also do not understand why he speaks in the DNS migration if there are two different domains.

Well, what he has to do is an exact copy of the site for the new domain in a new host plan.
After the copy being hosted in the new domain, it does a 301 redirecting the old domain to new. So all pages will redirect to the new, including the intern will be right and you will not lose rankings.

[Shopadorn]

Ok, SO I checked with my web designer about the transfer and showed her the strand.  This was her response.  Are we on the right page?  Her response is below.

There is so much in that email, I have no idea what's going on there. So people do recommend switching it? We have to switch the domains before doing 301 redirects. Hopefully all we need to do is hostshopadornonline.com with a redirect rule that will change the URL to shopadorn.com an keep the rest of the URL. If you do redirects now nothing will happen because there is technically nothing atshopadorn.com to redirect to. Yet. We need to switc the domain in volusion then wait for the dns an ip to move over to the new domain, hopefully won't take long, then one simple redirect rule can do it all, no need to redirect every page individually. My only concern was the losing ranking part so if thats not a problem, hurray!

[j0a0vargas]

Hi Nicole. If you make a 301 on the server from one domain to another. And on the new site, the inside pages have the same address, you need not apply 301 at all pages.Example:

If someone clicks on a link or a search page:

http://www.shopadornonline.com/Accessories-s/29.htm

The 301 will automatically interpret:

http://www.shopadorn.com/Accessories-s/29.htm

What Alan said about www and without www, that your site is not doing the 301 for only an option on the home. If you type www.shopadorn.com or shopadorn.com, the url remains. So you are dividing the relevance of your homepage.

To stay safe in the migration, follow the guidelines that Google asks:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83105&hl=en

There you can see more about the 301 redirect and also inform the webmaster tools on migration, so google transfers relevance.

Hope this has helped.

[EGOL]

That is the best plan.  There are also some online tools that a person can use to confirm that redirects have been placed correctly and work in a search engine friendly way.

[Shopadorn]

Thanks!  I am interested in Re-Directing and having a professional do it, but I need some one that will not only do it, but explain to me what they are doing, and how they are doing it.  I want to understand as I go along all the aspects of our site.

[AlanMosley]

At the moment google sees your site as 4 seperate sites,

shopadornonline.com

www.shopadornonline.com

shopadorn.com

www.shopadorn.com

you need to 301 them to one

UYou ra pages will be found at your new domain as you said, but will search engines send your link juicve to the new page? only if you 301 them.

[EGOL]

It sounds like one-time professional SEO help might be a good investment to be sure that everything is considered and executed perfectly.   This could be reviewed with the current designer to be sure that everything goes well.   Would cost a little money but well worth the spend.

[EGOL]

I think that shopadorn.com is a much better domain.  Congratulations.

I would consider redirecting your original domain to it.   If you are in this for the long term that is what I would do.

Redirects generally work well if done carefully.  Good luck!

[Shopadorn]

Hi,

Sorry for not completely understanding.  So I WANT my website to be www.shopadorn.com , so do I have to do a 301 redirect for every product?

My concern is a lot of blogs link to a specific product on our site.  So they would link to http://www.shopadornonline.com/Prairie-Underground-Long-Cloak-Hoodie-in-Natural-p/prairieu_longcloak_hoodie_nat.htm

Once I make the switch to shopadorn I believe my products will now be found at www.shopadorn.com/Prairie-Underground-Long-Cloak-Hoodie-in-Natural-p/prairieu_longcloak_hoodie_nat.htm

I'm just worried about being able to keep all of those links working.

Also what do you mean

"You also need to 301 redirect your www to non www or vice a versa"

Thanks!

[AlanMosley]

Pick one of the other and 301 redirect it to the other, at the moment you can get to your web site with either without a 301 redirect.
Your site has many 302 redirects

You also need to 301 redirect your www to non www or vice a versa