New web site and moving host?

[Stuart]

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Hello,

I was wondering if anyone could offer some advice, we have re-designed our web site and are moving to a new hosting provider as part of the process.

We have also moved the domain name from one name provider to another, all the zone files have bee copied over, except the DNS change for hosting

The old site has indexed pages - something like www.mysite.com/something/news.html

The domain www.mysite.com will stay the same and be the DNS (A name) will be updated to point to the new site. My question is: should we be adding a 301 redirect to the all the other pages that have a .com/something/XXX.html

Is there another way of doing this without using a 301 redirect? if we do, will Google penalise us in anyway

Your help is appreciated

Regards
Stuart

[Brendon]

If the domain remains the same, there's no need for redirects. G will pick up and process the zone files just fine. I would advise that you check VERY carefully that the zone files contain A records for every relevant domain and subdomain. I've seen sites killed for neglecting to create an A record for example.com, but remembering www.example.com

[Stuart]

Thanks Brendon,

I assume, as the domain is the same and the zone files are the same, that anything after the .com i.e. /example will be picked up by G and these specific pages would take them to the home page of the new site?

I thought that if Google shows a result of:
http://www.mysite.com/news/latest_news.html

When someone clicks on this link, they would get a page not found or something....


Thanks for the tip on zone files, will make sure that the zone files contain A records for both the main domain and any sub domains and or mysite.com and www.mysite.com

Regards
Stuart

[Brendon]

>> that anything after the .com i.e. /example will be picked up by G

Yup. DNS is purely for converting a domain name for an IP, analogous to a postal address. You are "moving offices", but the internal mail stays the same. Does that make sense?

[Stuart]

Hi,

Yes that makes perfect sense

Thanks again

Regards
Stuart

[Stuart]

Hello,

We switched on our new web site today - an example URL from the old site is:

http://www.mysite.com/news/latest_news.html

The end part of the domain (/news/latest_news.html) is being picked up by Google as this was previously indexed - when users click on this link, it takes them to a 404 page as the URL does not exist on the new site

Might be answering my own question, maybe it is because we are also switching the name to a new provider and the zone files have not been carried across yet, would that affect the end part of the URL, or should I use a 301 redirect for the old pages, as I asked yesterday - maybe I am just impatient and it takes a while for G to recognise the change?

Hope that makes sense - by the way, the new site pages are have new names and do not correspond to the old names

Thanks again
Stuart

[Brendon]

>> as the URL does not exist on the new site

That's the important part. You need to create the structure on the new server. Since you've changed the address of the root domain, a 301 cannot, by definition, redirect anyone to the old content, since the attempt at resolution will go back to your new site.... an infinte loop

[Stuart]

Thanks again Brendon

I should have mentioned that yestrday

Regards
Stuart

[Stuart]

Hi,

I have been monitoring our new site, since we switched servers and re-designed

We also built in a database structure so the old pages go to the new pages and done everything that has been suggested. Thanks for everyone’s help and PM's

I know it is a bit of an open ended question and I probably already know the answer, but I will ask anyway!

Has anyone got any idea how long it could take to get the PR rank back up to what it was on the old site, we still have PR 5 on the home page but all other pages have dropped to 0, where as previously they had ranks between 1 and 4. We only have around 15 pages

An example of the database structure we built is as follows:

Old site http://www.name.com/solution/technology.html
New site: http://www.name.com/Products/Technology.html

The old link goes straight to the new link

[eskimo]

Have you set up 301 redirects to the new links?

Apparently the Big Daddy update has resulted in a faster updating of the Google index, but in my experience it took weeks rather than days.