Moving a website to a new domain name

[ChrisM]

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I've just got a domain name that better suits one of my sites, and I'm wanting to move the site over. The actual process of doing this is obviously easy - but I'm clearly going to confuse people when they go to the old address and a different site is there (an entirely different site which will make better use of what I think is a great domain name).

There's three ways that I've thought of to minimise the disruption - my list so far is:

• Move the site now and redirect the domain name until the new site is ready
• Email exiting members to warn them about the change now, and again when the old address stops working
• Put a link on the new site when it goes up to remind people where the old site is

Has anyone done something similar before that can offer advice or does anyone have any ideas? Also with the redirect from old to new domain name until the new site goes live am I best using a meta refresh or an http redirect (or are they the same thing?? )

Any ideas would be gratefully received!

Cheers

Chris

[watcher]

From an SE point of view you're better of using a 301 Redirect than a meta-refresh.

[ChrisM]

Thanks watcher - fast response too!

[Rocky]

Or if you are using Linux you could add the new domain name to your httpd.conf using ServerAlias and leave everything else alone. Both new and old names will then point to exactly the same site, and local links should work too.

In our httpd.conf, the code looks something like this:

ServerName www.original-domain-name.co.uk
ServerAlias new-domain-name.co.uk
ServerAlias www.new-domain-name.co.uk

You will probably need root access to your server to do this though.

[watcher]

Rocky,

Won't those URLs then be (possibly) indexed by SEs as two seperate domains and cause duplicate content issues ? Or does that also cause the server to return 301 ?

[Rocky]

> Won't those URLs then be (possibly) indexed by SEs as two seperate domains and cause duplicate content issues ? Or does that also cause the server to return 301 ?

We have one site with 40 domains pointed to it using Serveralias. Many of the names are separately ranked by the SE's.

Some of the pages are ranked higher for some domain names than others, presumably because certain SE's take the domain name into account when determining ranking.

As far as I know none of the sites have been ever been penalised for duplication. I doubt whether SE bots are clever enough to detect duplication across domains and take autonomous action without a human intervening to confirm the situation.

I suspect that duplication only becomes a problem when it is reported to SE's by surfers.

[watcher]

Google may be clever enough.

[tomtomtomtomtom]

Originally posted by Rocky
>

I suspect that duplication only becomes a problem when it is reported to SE's by surfers.

But why would you want to risk it?

[Dynamoo]

If you alias the new domain to the old domain (so both are running on the same server) then there's a good chance that the NEW domain won't be picked up by SEs, because it will be seens as a duplicate of the OLD domain..

A 301 redirect is definitely the preferred way of doing it. Almost all SEs will understand this and pass through most if not all of the PageRank or whatever weighting system they use.

[Rocky]

> Google may be clever enough.

Not at the moment it seems.

> But why would you want to risk it?

We do it as a way of pointing domains that are confusingly similar to ours to our website without the need to set up more virtual servers.

Example: our site is mydomain.com
Serveralias covers: mydomian.com, mdomain.com etc

We were surprised when these other domains started being listed separately by SE's too.