Hi Nicole, first of all may I just say that this is one very, very nice site congratulations!! The domain name is also very nice!
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Yes, I do have an alternate domain but this site is my only form of income and had thought that a 301 would be a nice way of keeping my rankings and attracting more visitors.
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Do you know where your visitors are coming from? I am asking because if mainly australian based, you could get similar results with the australian domain, otherwise people might be put off.
301 usually works well to maintain rankings and
PR - I never had any troubles with it - but I never did a 301 to such an extent (mine were redirectMatch when I changed file extension and then a couple of unique 301 when some pages got removed - but that was for 50 or less pages sites).
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In regards to testing the 301 on a test server how would I go about doing that?
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Create a subdomain or buy a cheap domain. Block all spiders from going through it. Upload your old site (800 pages). Upload the .htaccess with the redirect from old url's to new url's. Run a link checker and make sure that all the urls that the server header response is 301 and that the 404 response correspond to the newly created url's.
Once / if you upload the new site to the old domain run a link checker again to make sure everything's ok.
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The 200K pages i had just planned to bust out all at once when the new site goes live however if this is not a good move, as the majority of pages will be business listings, i can release these in sections by category over a period of time.
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Not a good idea if on the old domain, ok to start with 200K+ if new domain (paradoxical isn't it).
Will the 200K+ pages all be business listings? Do they bring much to your site in terms of quality info for your visitors?
Because the 'old' site is your main source of revenue, I would launch the new site on a new domain / the other domain. But I would do this only if the content is different enough to not penalise your old site (ie. you may have to rewrite the 800 pages of the old site if you used them in the new).
Keep updating the old site at the same frequency you did before (if you can) and work on the new site as well. Link from the old site to the new on your homepage with a single link to let people know about the new site.
By having two site you get a bit more work to update both, but you also have a 'security' blanket if one falls over.
Hope this help.
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