Moved permanently and SERP

[goczilla]

I have a well ranked site on a domain that has been transfered to new ownership and the new owner requested that the content be removed from the site. However he agreed to put an .htaccess file on the old domain that will redirect (MOVED PERMANENTLY*) to the new domain name I've just registered.
Does anyone have any ideas how this will reflect my Search engine ranking. Will SE see the sites on the new domain as brand new or they will keep some of the value.

* By MOVED PERM. I mean redirecting each page on the old domain to the same page on the new one.

[cspelts]

Originally Posted by goczilla

Will SE see the sites on the new domain as brand new or they will keep some of the value.

That's an excellent question and I don't know the answer.

I've moved a site to a new domain before, and the new site ended up ranking better than the old site - after a few weeks of transition. But I'd be really curious to hear if that's the norm?

[goczilla]

Today I started moving some of the mini sites on the new domain. The first one to go is the SEO Tools site, pages with PR 4 or 5 added the MOVED PERM redirect and waiting to see the results.
I am qutite courious if the pages will have the same PR on the next google update so I'll wait to see what happens. My hopes are that google and the other SE will pass some value to the moved pages but I fear that they will be treated as brand new.

[jawn_tech]

301 redirects are a start, but remember the lifeblood to ranking in SE's like Google are the ibl's. In other words, the 301's will help for the short term, but waste no time in compensating for link power that may be lost due to links that just point to the domain itself, especially before the next update if possible.

Other SE's depend upon how well they handle 301 redirects, and the emphasis they place on content vs. links, esp. anchor text links.

[Serj]

A good example of a domain trasfer is qwestdex.com When they transfered to their new dexonline.com domain, within a few months they had their Google PR, same as the one that they had on qwestdex.com It will probably be a somewhat rough transition period, but it should not be for a long time.

[incrediblehelp]

jawn hit it on the head. 301 redirects are part of the solution. I have seen clients do better, stay the same and get worse rankings after a full domain switch using 301 redirects. Most of the time when they do worse is when they don't aggressively go after new links and get the old ones changed (if possible) to the new domain or domain and sub pages. Another issue we have to remember is if the new website has the same architecture, same content, etc. This obviously makes a difference. Of course if it is as simple as copying the website to a new domain these should not be an issue.

[goczilla]

Well moving the links will be the real problem.. as long as the site structure I moved from sub folders to subdomains. There was an excelent article somewhere on this site for the advantages and disadvantages of this method but anyway I'll stick to it.
For now I have moved all the sites. Everything is normal except for the AdSense CTR has gone down due to the NOT SO RELEVANT ads that are beeing displayed on the site. Once google crawls it I guess it will be OK.