Setting up a domain for a future site
-
Hi there,
That may be a bit of a silly question to ask, but we've setup a new domain for an existing site.
While the site is in the making, the site owners wants to already start promoting the new URL on stationeries etc.
Hence, we need to setup the new URL so that it forwards to the site, but so that Google doesn't give it the history of a secondary (less important) domain. What is the best way to do this? Currently we've put in a 301 redirect, but will that bear no future consequences on the SEO of the site, when the site is moved to this new domain, and the old domain is 301 redirected.
Thanks,
SEOeclipse
-
I agree with Dejan SEO - I'd 302 the new to old right now, then 301 the old to new when launched
-
If I understand the question correctly you want to temporarily point people to the old domain while you wait for the new domain site to be launched and stay there permanently.
If the above is correct then solution is:
pre-launch: setup 302 from newdomain.com to olddomain.com
post-launch: remove 302 and setup 301 from olddomain.com to newdomain.comThis way people who visit the new domain from stationery and printed material will go to the old domain and still get the content they expect while Google will be informed this change is only temporary. After the new site is launched you break the temporary redirect and setup a permanent redirect directive towards the new domain and new site.
-
From what you are saying here, you have a site XYZ.com that the domain name will change for once a new site for XYZ.com is developed. You will not be running two sites once the new site XYZmodified.com is up. Your concern is that any low ranking from Google for XYZ will be visited upon XYZmodified.com?
Assuming that the old site has no real negative history with Google and your new site is going to be better optimized, etc. I would think you would want at least to start with some of the ranking of the old site as you build links to the new. You will want to insure that the canonical points to the correct url once the new site is up and the old is down. In the interim the 301 redirect should take your customers for the new domain to the current without a problem.
PS Based on what I have seen in the Q and A with SEOmoz, we are all learning daily, there are no silly questions.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
IP Canonicalization for HTTPS site?
I received an unsolicited SEO report for one of my sites. My site was faulted for not having IP canonicalization set up. I reviewed this carefully. My site runs on Apache, is https and is on a dedicated IP. The mod rewrite rules for Apache all deal with the http version of the site. When I type my site's IP into a browser, I get the the https version, but with a unsecure cert warning as the certificate does not include the IP. Should I implement the http IP canonicalization rule. Another rewrite rule would then redirect the request to the https version?
On-Page Optimization | | FatRodent20130 -
Domain Authority
I made some changes to my site and many of my keywords improved dramatically. Its odd however, that the changes caused the domain authority to go down by 3 points, from 20 to 17. Is this a short term thing caused by recent changes and likely to recover?
On-Page Optimization | | KrisIrr0 -
Domain Authority vs. Page Authority?
I have a couple of questions about this. First of all is one more important than the other? Also, I currently have a website setup for www.domain.com, should I try to change that to domain.com without the www? How is it possible to grow page authority yet I am having a hard time growing domain authority.
On-Page Optimization | | jonnyholt0 -
Nofollow within your site, is it ever a good idea?
I started a new job running a companies E-commerce site. I have been going thought the site, backlinks etc to see what the current status is. I have noticed that they have "no followed some categorises on the (huge) mega menu, but also they have no followed every product form categories. Now personally I would have no follows on the login/register/checkout page, and maybe some external links, but my understanding has always been that by using no follow on internal links you just throwing away google juice. I'm thinking was someone at some stage trying to do some misguided link sculpting with no follow, or I'm I missing something Note: the company does not have brands per say for the product pages and so are not landing pages (the categories are landing pages)
On-Page Optimization | | PaddyDisplays0 -
Duplicate biographies across several domains?
Hey Gang, We've built a niche specific, manually edited legal community that is full of unique content. (While it's ultimately a directory, and that is often viewed as a bad word in these times, ours is a curated source that doesn't allow anyone and everyone to join.) We feel comfortable that it passes the sniff test post-panda/penguin, etc., and its doing rather well to date. The question we have is do we really need to create unique biographies for each of our legal members? Some of our competitors simply use the same bio information that the lawyer has on their own website and copies that to their site. The competitors I'm talking about are LARGE, well-respected, extremely successful folks, like FindLaw. Here's an example: Lawyer's website bio FindLaw website bio Both rank, etc., and the FindLaw code doesn't place any restrictions on their content regarding the bio., and it's an obvious exact match. I get that duplicate content is primarily a concern among one's own URL and the pages across a specific domain, using rel-canonical, etc., but what about two different domains that need to supply factual information that can't be altered? Is it anything we should worry ourselves with? Any tags we should insert in our code with regard to the bios? Thanks!!! Wayne
On-Page Optimization | | Wayne760 -
Site structure question
I'm currently working on a very awkward custom-WP setup, in which I can't maintain the present drop-down navigation menu without having those pages under a parent or without completely recoding everything. I have two requirements, for SEO purposes I'm looking for the following structure for each targeted landing page: www.example.com/landing-page as opposed to www.example.com/sub/landing-page Of course, having my landing pages as a child, I get the latter of the two. For navigational purposes they need to fall under a specific category in a drop-down menu. With any other theme or setup this is an easy fix, but not here. What I have now is that the landing pages are currently placed under a parent category page. But, they have custom permalinks. The permalinks are setup as follows www.example.com/landing-page But, technically the exact structure is still www.example.com/sub/landing-page which then redirects to the custom permalink. So, my question is - in an attempt to get my most important landing pages close to the root for better PR and crawlability, do I still get the same benefit with my current setup? Is this structure I have, better, worse, or indifferent? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | JayAdams320 -
What is a better mobile domain from an SEO perspective an m.example.com or using your regular domain with user agent detection?
Just wondering what domain is more beneficial for a mobile site and why.
On-Page Optimization | | CabbageTree0 -
Good Internal Site Structure Idea?
Hello SEOMoz, After reading a bunch of your Site Structure articles, I've decided to make ours more flat. There are numerous pages on our site which are linked to directly from our homepage, wasting mysterious amounts of Link Juice every day. I want to remove most of these links so that the Fewer, and now more heavily weighted, Homepage Links will be more powerful... but I am worried that the pages which I am knocking down to the 3rd tier level already have high rank and are distributing this Juice to other pages. The problem is that 3 of these 9 pages are great for assisting our sales team, so I cannot take those 2 links off of the homepage...so I will be forced to Nofollow them instead. I am worried this is cutting down the number of pages on the site, also cutting out content which was previously indexed. Is this whole thing a good idea at all? And should I just leave those 2 pages alone because I can't remove the link? I'm thinking maybe I should rel=canonical it back to the homepage? I am ultimately trying to rank the homepage for the keyword "POS Software" and this is my on-site strategy for it. Maybe adding a link from those 2 pages that say "POS Software" back to the homepage is the best bet in this scenario? I am trying to learn the absolute best thing to do instead of guessing. Thanks! Derek
On-Page Optimization | | DerekM880