Changing domain for a magento store

[daedriccarl]

Hi all, wondering if i could gather some views on the best approach for this please...

We currently have a magento site up with about 150,000 pages (although only 9k indexed in Google as product pages are set to no index by default until the default manufacturer description has been rewritten). The indexed pages are mainly category pages, filtering options and a few search results.

While none of the internal pages have massive DA - seem to average about 18-24 which isn't too bad for internal pages, I guess - I would like to transfer as much of this over to the new domain.

My question is, is it really feasible to have an htaccess with about 10,000 301 redirects on the current domain? The server is pretty powerful so could probably serve the file without issue but would Google be happy with that?

Would it be better to use the change url option in WMT instead. Ive never used that so not sure how that would work in this cause. Would it redirect users too?

As a footnote, the site is changing because of branding reasons and not because of a penalty of the site.

Thanks,

Carl

[daedriccarl]

Good tip, thanks.

[BruceA]

If there is any chanse that both sites will be live & crawlable at the same time, remember to put canonicals in the headers of the old site pages, so Google knows it is duplicated data.

Bruce

[daedriccarl]

The 'new' site is the old site moved over so the plan is to 301 and just change the domain name so domain.com/1 would redirect newdomain.com/1  etc

Hopefully that should cover all bases

[BruceA]

Hi Carl

No problem.  Quick tip, try and make the 301s match as close as possible from the old page content to the new page content.  If it is not quite 100% it will still pass the reduced juice to the new page, but if it is way off then any juice will be lost.

Bruce

[daedriccarl]

Thanks, Bruce.

I'll begin work on my large redirect file.

[BruceA]

You can have as many 301s as required, no problem at all.  Google will not mind at all.

You will lose some authority of between 1 to 10% via the redirected to...pages, but this is to be expected.  DA reflects the site and PA the page, so if you need to change the domain, then you will drop a bit, but will with good SEO bring this back up reasonable quickly.

WMT only specifies which version of the site you prefer, so Google knows that www.example.com and example.com are the same site. if you don't make a specification Google will not make the association and will class both as separate domains.

Bruce