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    4. Changing domain for a magento store

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    Changing domain for a magento store

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • daedriccarl
      daedriccarl last edited by

      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

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • daedriccarl
        daedriccarl @BruceA last edited by

        Good tip, thanks.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • BruceA
          BruceA @daedriccarl last edited by

          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 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • daedriccarl
            daedriccarl @BruceA last edited by

            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 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • BruceA
              BruceA @daedriccarl last edited by

              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 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • daedriccarl
                daedriccarl @BruceA last edited by

                Thanks, Bruce.

                I'll begin work on my large redirect file.

                BruceA 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • BruceA
                  BruceA last edited by

                  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

                  daedriccarl 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
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