301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?

[Grenadi]

Hi,

We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical.

Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site?

Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies.

Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet?

Thanks,

Anthony

[dunklea]

I snooped around in the Google Webmaster Tools help section and it seems like a lot of other people have faced the same problem with no solution offered. Shame on Google!

As much as possible, I would go back to all the sites that were linking to your old domain and ask them to update their links. 301s pass most of the link juice, but not all of it, so it's worthwhile to save as much as that as possible. It also helps Google start to ignore your old site and focus more on your new site.

This is all probably a lot of work, but I hope it works out! Good luck.

Andrew

[Grenadi]

Hey,

Thanks for your answer. We had a problem in that Google Webmaster doesn't recognise our domain (its a .vic.edu.au - Australian Education domain - it errors saying, 'this is not a root level domain) and won't let me access settings like the page moving setting.

Will they work it out anyway? Is there anything else we can do to help it?

Thanks again,

Anthony

[dunklea]

A 301 redirect is basically telling search engines that content has moved from an old URL to a new one. In order to do this effectively the content has to no longer exist on the old domain (if a 301 redirect wasn't there, a 404 would be returned).

And yes, you should redirect each page individually. This will ensure that what PageRank the old content had is passed onto the correct new content. Redirecting everything to your homepage means that the rest of your new site is effectively starting from scratch.

If you're trying to redirect over thousands of URLs you might want to look into writing some custom Apache script to match everything together. It's a little tricky, but can potentially save you a lot of time!

Good luck,

Andrew

PS. Remember to update your Google Webmaster settings to let Google know that you moved your content to a new domain.