Moving website to new URL

[padfoot]

Hi All,

Hope this is in right place but basically i need a little advice about retaining my search ranking when moving to another URL. I have got a website URL which attracts 2000 uniquie visitor a day, but a while back this url got banned from adsense through no fault of my own, well i suppose it was a bit my fault!! i basically implemented some links in a way that they were similar to the other website navigation, not identical i might add and no more so that many other reputable webistes still do now. I got the email asking me to change them, i then responded asking if simply changing the colour would be enough, to which the google representative said yes. Therefore this is what i did and a week later it was banned. And there does not seem any way to get this changed, whenever i have contatced google I just get the same person saying once a URL is banned thats it, end of...But anyway thats a differmt story.

What i need to do now is get these visitors to the new site but still maintaining my search engine ranking. The only problem is i dont really know how i got such a higher ranking in the first place i just wrote the site for my own purpose and people seemed to find it, top 3 for my main search term and most of the links back to my site are from people unknown to me, forums or code republished with the link included and i know i will not be able to get them changed to the new URL. Currently i am just offering various links from the old url to the new one which people can click on, but this is only capturing 500ish a day.

I know the best way is to do a 301 redirect via my htaccess file but if i do this and dont get the same links coming to the new site i will have lost all these visitors so i need to get this right first time. At least as it stands i still have the visitors just cant make money from them.

Appologies for such a long message, any ideas about best way forward would be much appreciated!
Cheers
Mart

[Jean-Luc]

Hi,

Assuming that the new site has the same structure as the old one, you can redirect (301) each page of the old site to the same page of the new site. This should keep the visitors coming from other sites linking to you and, after a while, the new site wiil hopefully get the same rank in the SERP's as the old one.

Not sure that I understand the logic of all this though. If AdSense banned your old site "for ever", why would they accept that you place AdSense ads in the new site which is a kind of clone of the old one. If only the URL was banned and not your account as such, I would try to renegotiate with AdSense for the old site.

Jean-Luc

[padfoot]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply, yes it makes no sense does it, but they have made it very clear they are happy for me to place links on other URLs. I would love to renegotiate with AdSense for the old site but there just does not seem any way to do it. Whenever i send an email i just get same responce, did try to find a phone number to ring and actually speak to someone but couldnt seem to find one. Have you got any advice on a better way of renegotiating with adsense?

Regards
Mart

[govindseo]

you can use 301 redirect for moving website to new URL.

Thanks!

[SemAdvance]

I think you should forget Adsenseless and find an affiliate offer or two your visitors are apt to want.

There are also other contextual advertising services that pay as well if not better than Adsenseless.

Affiliate offers typically pay larger amounts per sale that can offset any revenues earned from ads from El Goog.

[bhartzer]

Padfoot, the best thing to do is to set up 301 Permanent Redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs. I wouldn't worry about Adsense for now; you might consider applying to the Yahoo Publisher Network instead. Work on getting traffic and links to your site: you can always monetize it later.

[2fk]

Yes 301 is the safest way to preserve whatever juice you have on your site it's the only way to keep your visitors. Regarding on your adsense well you can start it over on the new site if your older site was banned..but adsense is not the only way to earn online..you can have affiliate program $$ ...

[padfoot]

Thanks very much for all the replies,

I have tried a number affiliate advertising services including adbrite, commission junction etc but i don’t really get any success. I’m not really sure why but the adverts served up by adsense are very close to my website topic. Whereas the adverts served up through other networks seem to be very generic, every day things and not that specific to my site. I think YPN would be a good thing to try but unfortunately I live in the UK so am not eligible for this! I have actually just got my azoogle account activated so am going to give them a try, and see how that works out! Anyone got any recommendations of specific networks that they think I should try?

Regards
Mart

[jordanmcclements]

Padfoot - can you give us the URL of your banned site?

[jordanmcclements]

Or do you have a screenshot of what it used to look like before you removed Adsense?

Form what you have said I don;t understand why they would ban you....

[cbosleeds]

I'd also suggest that once your back up and running with Adsense or other PPC service working for you that adding affiliate marketing into the blend as well might be worth it. Some of my affiliate ads dont work, others are just pure gold. Always worth giving it another try and seeing if you have better luck, since with the number of unique visitors you have, any affiliate marketing that works should really pay dividends.

[jordanmcclements]

But I do agree with Padfoot - there are some sites where Adsense works fantastically well - and you could spend a hundred hours messing around with different affiliate programs and *never* make as much money as you did with Adsense.

[padfoot]

Here is a screen shot of how the pages that adsense did not like looked at the point of banning! The other anoying thing is that there was only about 20-30 pages of a 450+ page site that had this kind of layout.

[jordanmcclements]

mmmmm...

That does seem extremely unfair.

I have seen a lot of examples that are more misleading than that!

[inertia]

I don't know a huge amount about adsense so i cant give you much in the way of advice on that front. All I will say is, old domains are worth a lot in SEO terms so you would be wise to try everything you can before redirecting.

301s are great! From my experience they work perfectly and as long as they're in place all the old links will pass the link juice and ranking factors to your new site. One factor to check is that the site you are redirecting to has the same type and amounts of content as the previous site. So make sure all title tags, body text etc is up to the same standard as the previous site or you may end up loosing positions.

[jordanmcclements]

I 99% agree that a proper 301 to the new site (with all filenames and directories identical) will work great and NOT lose you any ranking worth talking about - getting the incoming links changed is a minor consideration - but probably something you should do at some point...

What I don't understand is why they banned you from just that one domain - and why they wouldn't do exactly the same thing again once the new one is set up..

[padfoot]

Originally Posted by jordanmcclements

What I don't understand is why they banned you from just that one domain - and why they wouldn't do exactly the same thing again once the new one is set up..

Because they only banned the URL because of the structure/deployment of the adds in relation to my website navigation. On the new site i will not implement the adsense code in the same way, will make sure there is a border round it so that there is no way i could be acused of misleading the user! Thats the theory anyway!

Regards
Mart

[MajorTom]

Originally Posted by inertia

All I will say is, old domains are worth a lot in SEO terms so you would be wise to try everything you can before redirecting.

Not true... If you were listening in to the "Google Webmaster Central Tricks and Treats" live event you would have heard Matt Cutts dispel this myth along with several other myths

The Google team in the event also made it clear that pagerank and all other page attributes will be passed to the new url if you use a permanent 301 redirect.

As far as Adsense goes, try Chitika Premium. It's the best alternative I've found to Adsense, especially if you're getting a lot of search engine traffic.

[BZDesign]

you can put a link at your old URL to tell visitor that your site moved.
new url's ranking will start from 0 again.

Atlanta website design

[padfoot]

Thanks again for all your replies, just one last question! if i use 301 redirect, would there be any dowside to moving few pages at a time over say a year, rather than simply 301 redirecting the whole website in one go?

[ronchalice]

Padfoot,

You never did give us the url of your site, but if you are sapdevelopment.co.uk, I can see why you might have been banned. The pages on this site look very much like they are pretending to be either simplysap.com or worse yet, SAP AG. This site is never actually identified as SAP Development Company (or whatever). The only clear company identifications on the page are the trademarks of SAP AG and SimplySAP.

If this is not your page, I apologize for the misunderstanding. If it is, you may have more trouble coming than just being banned by Google.

[padfoot]

The reason for my ban was purly down to the link discrepancies i have described!

Regards
Mart

[jordanmcclements]

Just 301 the whole site and be done with it.

The extra work involved with moving the site one page at a time - it just not worth it in my experience..

See the following thread for more info on 301:-

New Domain SEO 301 Redirects

[padfoot]

think i might just do that! there is no benefit of moving it to an existing site is there, so I can just create new URL dump a copy of the site onto that and implement the 301 redirect from old URL!

Regards
Mart

[jordanmcclements]

Yes.

You then just need to add one line to your .htaccess file and you are done...

[padfoot]

Hi all,

Just another quick question, i have just found out that my website is hosted on a windows server and there is no way of getting it transfered to a unix box with the current provider, so cant use the htaccess file, and as they dont even provide a front end controll pannel it looks like im going to have to transfer my domain to a new provider before i do the 301 redirect. Has anyone got any advise on how best to do this. I believe it is currently hosted on a UK server so is it best to move it to another UK server or does it not matter?

Also if i sign up to a package that has say a 1gb transfer limit, will this limit still be effective if there is a 301 redirect in place or will the 301 mean it is essencially recieving no traffic?

Cheers
Mart

[inertia]

I've been in this situation a few times but all my clients sites are with a host provider who simply swap it to linux and youre sorted!

It's not a hard task though, just find some Linux hosting (make sure to ask if Apache is available on the server and if youre targeting the UK then keep it on a UK server) upload your site and change the dns record through your domain registrar. Should be seamless enough!

The 301 sends traffic elsewhere so it uses next to nothing and would only peak that limit if you were getting a serious amount of traffic.

[padfoot]

Thanks inertia for the reply,

To be honest im not really specifically targeting the UK, in fact acording to google analytics about 35% of my visitors are from the US, about 30% from india, 10% from the UK and the rest spread out through europe! Am just concernd moving it may effect ranking! Have you got any recomemndations of good host providers?

cheers
Mart

[jordanmcclements]

I use register1.net and am very happy with them.

They are not the cheapest - but if you are making more than £1 per day, then it is daft to go with less reliable hosting...

[inertia]

It might be worth hosting in the US then? Think about which country has your biggest potential audience and get the hosting from there.
The company I work for use fasthost but were in the process of moving to a new provider. On some things fasthost are great but on others theyre crap!
For example, the other day we enquired about getting isapi re-write working because a lot of our sites are asp. But they wont provide it! So we are in the process of moving to a new host provider who does! HA!

[jordanmcclements]

Maybe - but if it was me - I would take it one step at a time and stay in the uk for now - but it is a hard oen to call I guess...

[padfoot]

thansk again for replies, just had a look at register1.net, what is the advantage of having own IP address with the VDS pro package and is this somthing i need?

[inertia]

Yeah, might rock the boat i suppose.
@padfoot - If youve got the .com it doesnt really matter a huge amount.

[jordanmcclements]

Having your own IP *may* help a little in SEO in that you are not sharing an IP address with 700 other spammy web sites.

But in practise it probably makes very little difference, unless anyone else here knows better...

NB - unless you are planning to have HUGE amounts of traffic - I don't think you really need the pro version..

[inertia]

From my experience sites on shared hosting do just as well. If you're really concerned you can check what sites are on that server with this tool: YouGetSignal.com - Find Other Web Sites Hosted on a Web Server

[padfoot]

cheers for that very useful, seems my url is already on shared hosting so i guess it would be no change to what i have now.