New website and new domain

[YNWA]

Hi,

We have a domain with current e-commerce site on, about 5 years old.

We have a new website being built with a different company and a new domain name.

We are transferring our old domain over to new provider and 301'ing the domain to new domain.

However, we can not take the current website with us, so we lose all our links/pages etc..

How important would it be to take a wrap of our current website to keep all the pages alive?

Is there anything we can do so oldurl.com/brand/tshirt/ doesnt lose its rank? Can we 301 individual pages if we dont have the actual website? Just the domain name.

Any help be great.

Thanks

[YNWA]

Hi,

We are not using the same domain name as its not user friendly. It is brandname-online.com rather than brandnameonline.com or brandnameonline.co.uk. Its a pain in the arse for emails, telling people over the phone and general stuff regardless of the SEO side of it. Many people dont use the -

We own the domain name but we can not take the website. So my thinking was that if we cant take the website, then we cant take all the links we have out there that go to anything other than the root domain brandname-online.com.? Is this correct?

My problem is I dont think we can 301 all the individual products pages (some of which will have sold out anyways) to the new website? Rather we can just 301 the current domain to our new domain? Do I have that wrong?

In brief...

We have a website and a domain name
We can not take the website itself
We CAN take the domain name

We have bought a new domain name
We plan on 301'in the current domain to the new domain

Do we have any work around for individual pages on current domain to get them to the new domain ? Or will our 301 on the current domain send all traffic to current site to our new websites homepage?

THanks

[danatanseo]

Howdie,

While I've gotten much better at technical SEO due to necessity over the last 4 years, I still don't consider it my "forte." That being said...Are you maintaining ownership of the old domain or have you sold it? If you still own the old domain, I dont see any reason why you can't 301-redirect individual pages from the old domain to the new domain. Moz.com just went through this scenario...quite successfully it seems. If you aren't maintaining ownership of the old domain, I think that was a mistake and agree with Lesley. Hold on for the ride because it's about to get ugly.

Sorry, I don't mean to be negative, but domain migrations are scary even for the best in the business. If there's any way in hell to do it, 301 your old pages to new "equivalent" pages on the new domain. Even if you do that, hold on for the ride. It will still most probably be ugly for a few months.

Good wishes and I hope all goes well!

Dana

[LesleyPaone]

Why are you not using the same domain name? I think you are going to have ranking problems and customer trust issues by changing the domain name.

On the other hand since you own the domain, I would run a tool like screaming frog on it to spider it. Then when you move the hosting, write 301 redirects from all of the old products and pages to the new corresponding one.

But if there is any chance that you can keep the 5 year old domain and it is not penalized, I would. Domain trust is an important factor.