Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey,

Thanks for your answer. We had a problem in that Google Webmaster doesn't recognise our domain (its a .vic.edu.au - Australian Education domain - it errors saying, 'this is not a root level domain) and won't let me access settings like the page moving setting.

Will they work it out anyway? Is there anything else we can do to help it?

Thanks again,

Anthony

Hi,

We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical.

Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site?

Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies.

Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet?

Thanks,

Anthony

Hey,

I had immense trouble with GWT because it wouldn't accept my domain name (.vic.edu.au) and kept coming up with the error 'not a root level domain) even though it was the correct domain. I checked with their bug tracker and several people with obscure domain names had the same problem. It will let me submit the site and use most GWT tools but not the change of address tool and a couple of others - any thoughts on how to make GWT re-index my site faster anyway?

Thanks,

Anthony

Thanks EGOL,

Know any tools that I could use to do a direct analysis of the sites' ranking / SEO status immediately before and immediately after the 301 has taken place? I know that SEOmoz toolset is good for this but it only crawls every week (or whatever) - I would like to see the differences between the two domains immediately if possible as soon as the DNS change has taken affect (so within 24 hours probably).

Thanks,

Anthony

Hi Wissam,

The site is moving to a new domain but the content is identical.

Thanks for your reply.

Anthony

Hi EGOL.

Thanks for your reply.

In regards to this particular situation the old site has a pagerank of 5 also and the new domain obviously 1 as it is new.

I really only need the front page of the site to keep its rank.

One big problem that I could have is that I have setup everything ready for the 301 (I only need to change the DNS on the old site to point to the new server) - so i now have 2 websites running with exact duplicate content (they're identical apart from domain name).  I cannot now take the new site offline as it is being used extensively - so I need the old site for its rank and the new site for its function - which is worse - possibly dropping rank for a few weeks between Google crawls or having duplicate content for several weeks till we can do the 301?

I suppose I could 301 the new domain to the old domain, leave it for a couple of months until the important ranking season is over then swap and 301 the old domain to the new domain... or would that be too confusing for Google and SEO rankings?

Lastly a bit more technical info that might help:

There is actually two old sites both identical (mirrored because they thought it would be good for SEO not knowing about duplicate content problems). The two old sites are both .com.au sites. The new domain which I want to 301 both sites too is a .vic.edu.au site which is an obscure domain name related to the education department in Victoria, Australia - I have been told that government and education domain names tend to have better chances with SEO, but I wonder if such an obscure domain extension might hurt my chances?

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Anthony

Hi all,

I'm about to hit the crunch button and finalise the 301 setup for our website to redirect all traffic, and our old very nice ranking, to our new website. My only question is, how long will the ranking take to move to the new site?

Once the 301 is in place what happens when someone searches my keywords? Currently when you search our preferred keywords we rank 1 and 2 depending on the wording. Once I've made the 301 happen, will you see the old site in Google rankings until they re-index it or will it swap straight away to the new site with its continued high rank (from the link juice) or will I have a blackspot period where I don't rank at all? I cannot afford to have a period of time, at this time of year, that I don't rank 1 or 2 - if this is even a vague possibility I might have to consider postponing my 301 till a less important time of year.

Thanks for your help,

Anthony

Hey all,

I'm about to setup a 301 on a website that has pretty good SEO rankings and I have the ability to change all the old inbound links that point to the old site, to the new site - should I leave them pointing to the old site that has the 301 on it or change all the old inbound links to the new domain name?

Which has better SEO value?

Thanks for helping,

Anthony

Hey,

I tried to find and answer to this seemingly simple question, but no luck.

So, I have one domain name with a website attached to it. I also registered all the other domain names that are similar to it or have different extensions - I want to redirect all the other domain names to my one main domain name without getting penalised by the big G.

It looks like this:

www.mainsite.com - this is my main domain

I also have www.mainsite.com.au, www.mainsite.org, and www.mainsite.org.au which I all want to just redirect to www.mainsite.com

I have been told that the best way to do this is a 301 redirect, but to do that you need to make a CNAME for all the other domains that points to www.mainsite.com.

My problem is that I cannot seem to create a CNAME record for http://mainsite.com - I have it working for http://www.mainsite.com but not the non www record.

What should I be doing differently? Is it just my DNS provider is useless?

Thanks,

Anthony

Hi Ryan (and others),

Thanks for your answer it was very helpful. So the following strategy would suit:

1. Swap domain name and put a single 301 redirect on the entire old domain name to go to the new domain name, which would work because all the pages would be the same.

2. Once I waited a while and had decent stats on the redirect I could then start to make changes to the pages on the site and keep an eye on their rank. Would you do this on an individual page by page basis or build out new content for the existing pages offline then update the whole site at once?

Lastly, what are the best tools for evaluating and analysing pre and post migration SEO of the site? At the moment I only have Google Analytics... is there something more comprehensive that is SEO specific that I should be watching it with. I've never used the SEOmoz campaign toolset (only signed up this week) so I don't know how it works, or even what it does - is that the best thing to use?

Thanks again,

Anthony

I searched the current questions and found similar questions but nothing as specific as what I wanted, so...

We are a graphic design school in Melbourne Australia. We have a website - www.graphicschool.com.au - that ranks fairly well in Google for our particular search terms. We have rebranded the organisation and want to change the website domain name to the new branding - www.grenadi.vic.edu.au - but obviously do not want to lose our hard earned SEO and rankings. We only have two strategies so far, and are not sure what the pros and cons to either strategy are, or whether there is a better way.

The two ideas we have are:

Option 1) Just swap the domain name.

We were thinking about swapping the domain name and setting up 301 redirects to tell Google that the old page that ranked well is now this page 'x' on the new site. I've read that you lose all your valuable links doing this because they are domain specific and the 301 doesn't forward your links.

Option 2) Build a second website.

This idea is that we would build a second website with our new domain name and branding and build up that site until it ranks as highly as the first site and then start to remove the first site. We're planning on completely redeveloping the current website anyway and changing and adding lots more content as well so this option is not out of the question.

Any help, thoughts, suggestions or further options would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to discuss.

Can I also please suggest that a new category is added under 'The SEO Process' - something like 'rebranding / migration'

Cheers,

Anthony