Experience/suggestions in redirecting old URLs (from an existing site) to new URLs under a new domain
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Please share your experiences/suggestions in redirecting a set of pages (10,000 or more pages/URLs) from an existing domain to new URLs under a new domain.
Thanks in advance!
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Just to add to Alan's answer, and this is from pure experience:
- You'll likely see a "down" period. Expect organic traffic to drop for a few weeks and hopefully get back to previous level or better. If you rely on organic, up your spend on PPC during this period
- Do not redirect internal pages to the root. domainA.com/page should redirect to another inner page. Don't start redirecting groups of pages to the new root.
- Like Alan said, pages without external links are not worth redirecting. Make sure you get all of your links from OSE, Majestic, Ahrefs and WMT to get a decent picture. Ensure you're redirecting to similar content too!
- Change the site address in WMT, verify new site in WMT - watch this like a hawk, especially crawl errors.
- Once the new site is up, submit your XML sitemaps to WMT.
- Triple check your robots.txt, and other robots directives - I've see too many sites go up with NOINDEX and full robots.txt blocks.
- Fetch pages in WMT to ensure you're getting 200 response codes on your most important / new pages
- Recrawl all your old pages (that you've redirected) to ensure they return a 301 > 200. No chains, just 1 301.
There's probably more, but those are the essentials.
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Why is there no "301" in the following unlike in the first sample:
Redirect /olddirectory/oldfile.html http:/myexample.com/newdirectory/newfile.html
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If the site structure is the same, then a simple redirect from oldDomain.com to newDomaina.com will do the trick.
If the site structure is different, then I would look at your external links, if a page has links then redirect it to a page with same or simular content on new site, those that don't have external links I would not bother wit there is no value in redirecting them.
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Hi
You will need to create a redirect using a .htaccess file
This allows you to redirect your entire website to your new domain Redirect 301 / http://www.myexample.com/
Redirect old file path to new file path
Redirect /olddirectory/oldfile.html http:/myexample.com/newdirectory/newfile.html
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