Transfer of website

[maria vargacz]

My company has an old website that has a ranking of 6 and we want to change it's name. If we create a new website and get all those that link to the old site to change our company's address too, would we retain the ranking?

Thanks for any help.

[minstrel]

Originally Posted by maria vargacz

My company has an old website that has a ranking of 6 and we want to change it's name. If we create a new website and get all those that link to the old site to change our company's address too, would we retain the ranking?

You will not RETAIN the ranking since it will be treated as a new site, but you will REGAIN the ranking once the new site is indexed and all those links to your old site are changed over.

The best way to handle this is to leave the old site online with redirects to the new site until the new site is indexed by Google and all the backlinks are changed over. That way, anyone finding you in Google or clicking through to your site from one of the backlinks won't just get a "file not found" error...

[HomeStar]

Originally Posted by minstrel

You will not RETAIN the ranking since it will be treated as a new site, but you will REGAIN the ranking once the new site is indexed and all those links to your old site are changed over.

The best way to handle this is to leave the old site online with redirects to the new site until the new site is indexed by Google and all the backlinks are changed over. That way, anyone finding you in Google or clicking through to your site from one of the backlinks won't just get a "file not found" error...

Agree. Maintain the old website. If possible link the individual pages from the old site to the pages of the new site which contain the same content.

[DanThies]

You would want to use a 301 Moved Permanently server response on the old domain, to refer visitors (and spiders) to the new domain. Google is capable of following that redirect, and Inktomi should follow it as well.

[scisoft]

Agree, 301 should retain your pagerank. The second best choice is using meta redirect at your old site, but keep the 10 secons limit!
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="10"; url=http://www....">