Best permanenet 301 strategy for NEW site

Hi everyone..

Hope all is well ...... can someone please give me a link or explain the safest google strategy for moving to a new domain.

We are switching our german site over to a new domain and I want to make sure i do the change over properly.

So the two tihngs i would like to know are:

1) The best 301 startegy for moving from sitea.de to siteb.de .

2) Do I remove the pages from sitea.de after i put in the redirect or leave them up?

3) Do i have to use a separate redirect for each invidual page or can i do a bulk transfer.

ps: Our rankings for our german site have been average at best.... so the urgency of maintaining rankings are not as important at the moment.... what i am concerned about is the link popularity..... also... i would like to make sure i do this right in case i have to changeover one of our high traffic sites in the near future.

Thanks in advance. This is one area I have yet to experience.

Do I remove the pages from sitea.de after i put in the redirect or leave them up?

Remove them. The whole point is the you're moving them to a new domain. So move them to the new domain and then remove the old pages on the old domain.

Do i have to use a separate redirect for each invidual page or can i do a bulk transfer

It's really up to you. The ideal situation is that if a visitor to your website visits a page on your old domain they will be redirected (via a 301) to the new page on the new domain. You can do this be adding a line in your .htaccess file for every page in the site.

If you have a lot of pages on your site (therefore your .htaccess file would be HUGE), then it might not make sense to add the pages to your .htaccess file.

the urgency of maintaining rankings are not as important at the moment

It's always a difficult task to move domains from one to another. Since rankings aren't a big concern, then redirecting the entire domain may be sufficient. The spiders will reindex the new site and the new pages will get into the index.

concerned about is the link popularity

When you do a 301, all your links from the old domain are credited to the new domain. So, there really shouldn't be a problem. You'll want to notify everyone who's linking to you, though, so you can tell them the new URL.

If you were keeping the same domain name but moving hosts then I would leave the old pages up for a few days just in case anything comes back to you by IP rather than URL.


You say that the domain name is changing, so in this case it is safe to remove the old pages and just let the redirect do the work. If the pages and folders on the new site match the names and structure of the old site then a simple four-line entry in the .htaccess file of the old site will do the job; as posted in a recent swervedrivers thread.

.

Redirect 301 / http://newdomain.com/

Put that in an .htaccess file on your old server and you're done. It doesn't matter whether you remove the old pages or not, because with the redirect in effect no one will be able to get to them anyway.