Domain Switch - With lost control of original domain.

[KBK]

Hey all,

A client finally sold a domain name after being harassed to sell for many years, without talking to us about it first. They moved the site to a new domain, and the purchasing company took over the original domain. Then they called me, wondering why the site is no longer showing up in Google.

I've done some initial research, and everything I find for advice assumes that you have control over the original domain.  We don't.  I'm hoping someone here has some creative advice, so we don't have to start from the beginning, and/or painfully update links we've acquired.

My only thought was that the new company may be kind enough to post 301's for us if we provided them....

Any thoughts / advice / life rings will be greatly appreciated! 

[XNUMERIK]

You are most welcome!

Good luck to you

[KBK]

Thank you!  This is exactly the information I was looking for - gives me the perfect place to start.  I really appreciate it!

[XNUMERIK]

If you can get the buyer to put redirects in place, here are your three options:

1. Redirect ANYTHING to the new domain's homepage: olddom.com/* => newdom.com

This is very easy to do technically, can even be done in the domain registrar's control panel. However, that's a bad option from an SEO point of view as you would be redirection anything (pages, contact info, product...) to your a single page, your homepage.

Should be used as a last option.

2. Redirect pages individually. You would end up with an .htaccess like that (I am assuming you didn't change anything to the site's structure):

redirect 301 /dir1/page32.php http://www.newdom.com/dir1/page32.php

redirect 301 /dir1/page33.php http://www.newdom.com/dir1/page33.php

redirect 301 /dir1/page34.php http://www.newdom.com/dir1/page34.php

...

This option is obviously time consuming but will give you the most control and the best SEO results as you will direct every single page (old one) to the new one (updated URL) passing its link juice and everything.

3. A generic redirect that will automatically redirect each and every page to its corresponding one on the new domain:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^oldsite.com

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This is very similar to option 2 but it is not as time consuming.

Hope that helps.

[KBK]

You're right, and thanks for the confirmation!

On the subject of redirects - am I correct in assuming that a general redirect is impossible (as it would redirect all traffic, even "legit" traffic to the new site), and that we'd have to create a 301 for each page?

Thank you for answering my questions / confirming my suspicions. Being that this is an extremely inadvisable situation to get yourself into, there's really just not a lot of info/advice out there, even if it's just to tell you that  you're SOL!

[XNUMERIK]

I think you know the answer, you just need someone else to confirm that there is little you can do!

Obviously, you should start by updating the links you control and build some new ones.

You must alos make certain the content is unique and that the buyer doens't use the original content.

If you had implemented authorship, you could still benefit from it by updating the links.

That's all I can think of.

Of course, the best thing you could get is a nice 301 Redirection for the buyer.

Google luck!