Moving an existing site to a new domain

[craigmn3]

Alright I am beginning the process of moving a site to a new Domain

Through spurious and sundry links which Panda and Penguin found distasteful that I cannot get removed, and a vigorous smear campaign by my clients competitor, it make sense to change "identities" and refresh into a new name/ domain name


The Old Domain has been registered since 1999 so it has a lot of age

The new domain has been registered since 2008 so it has some age

The site has 1400 indexed pages including a blog.

The Old Domain has @ 100K inbound links....most of them the unwanted kind

The New domain has basically been a place keeper with little traffic. and has maybe 6 inbound links

( So of course I will start a proper and aggressive linking strategy)

The Old Domain did not have the keyworld in the Url, the new does



Concerns and questions

What don't I know that I should be concerned with.

Is having a stop word in the url a problem? as in bestbluewidgets.tld

Google suggest 301 directing each page, over a universal redirect, is this correct even if the page names remain the same

Will inbound links follow me....even the unwanted ones

Is the age difference in the Domains going to make a big difference

Currently they surviving on long tail keywords, as the main keyword has been penguinated

Help me obi won Kanobe, you are my only hope

[C0ldf1re]

Hi Craig,

I see that this is the third thread where you have asked for information on this problem.

... Through spurious and sundry links which Panda and Penguin found distasteful that I cannot get removed, and a vigorous smear campaign by my clients competitor, it make sense to change "identities" and refresh into a new name/ domain name...

If the smear campaign is still active, it will be one of the first things to follow to the new domain. There is no technical way to stop this. A lawyer might be able to deter the smear campaign. Naturally, the most effective smear campaigns cannot be traced back to the originators, and have large elements of truth in them. All the same, an aggressive lawyer should be able to make the originators think twice. Of course, I don't know your jurisdiction; I am taking an educated guess from your perfect English that you are in a "Common Law" area (UK, USA, Canada, Australia, etc.)

Is having a stop word in the url a problem? as in bestbluewidgets.tld...

Google are good at parsing URL's to find the words inside.

Google suggest 301 directing each page, over a universal redirect, is this correct even if the page names remain the same...

The page names will not be exactly the same; the URL is part of the page name.

Will inbound links follow me....even the unwanted ones...

A redirect will redirect everything, both good and bad. You need to seriously consider stripping the old site down to a single page, which just says, "Our newer and better website is at newdomain.tld, please click here to go there."

Is the age difference in the Domains going to make a big difference...

We think that domain "trust" is a contributing factor towards position in serps, and that domain age is a contributing factor in domain trust. But it looks like your old domain doesn't have much Google trust anyway.

HTH! (hope this helps)... and naturally some of what I have written is based only on theory. So be prepared for other members who subscribe to different theories to disagree with me!

[craigmn3]

Thank you for the reply is is very helpful

[aruldave]

A temporary redirect 302 may work well for this situation. Using 302 redirection you can redirect every old domain requests to the new domain with no back link values of old domain associated.

[craigmn3]

Thank you again guys....associated question

Google webmaster tools tells me how many of the pages are indexed, and they are close (about 50 less) than the site maps
I am going to do individual 301 -302 Page redirections....and was going to work off the sitemaps to try and shortcut the process just a little bit

Is there was a way besides site:domain.tld...perhaps a way of GWMT to download a table of the pages indexed by google? I can't seem to find on in Web Master Tools

there seems to be little to confirm that the 1400 pages in my site maps are the ones indexed by google (and not old pages, that were supposedly redirected) just trying to cover all the bases before I pull the trigger

[easypr]

Redirect your website in 301 redirection. 301 Redirection is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 redirection refer to the HTTP status codes for this type of redirect. So, always redirect your website with the help of 301 redirection.

[deepsand]

Redirect your website in 301 redirection. 301 Redirection is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 redirection refer to the HTTP status codes for this type of redirect. So, always redirect your website with the help of 301 redirection.

Not only does a 301 not, per Matt Cutts, pass that great a portion of PageRank, a 301 is not categorically the way to go.

[WAHM]

Redirect your website in 301 redirection. 301 Redirection is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 redirection refer to the HTTP status codes for this type of redirect. So, always redirect your website with the help of 301 redirection.

Umm, didn't you READ the OP? If he did this he'd be passing on the problem with the old domain right to the new domain, which is exactly the result he's trying to avoid.