5 replies to this topic

[Mike D]

I have read alot about Google's trust eliment in search rankings and how a trusted site with a long standing domain name may have advantages over a new domain name. Do you think that the trust is placed in the domain name or the url address of the specific page? The reason I ask is: I have a very old outdated site that ranks in the top 3 in all our major search terms. For various reasons we need to an must change our host (DNS) and completely redesign the website. We will also be changing form cold fusion (.cfm) to .asp. Our domain name and ownership will stay the same however all static pages will have there urls rewritten (for example: www.website.com/widgets.cfm to www.website.com/widgets.asp not to mention all the dynamic page urls will be cleaned up to eliminate bot confusing characters. I understand and have planed for a loss of indexing by 301 redirects and xml site maps however will we lose trust with these changes? I hope I explained this correctly!?

Any help/advise would be greatly appriciated.

Mike

[Jill]

It's mostly just by domain not by page.

[Randy]

Going off topic from the Trust question...

Realize that when/if you change all of the page file names you're going to throw all of the search engines for a major loop. Depending upon how often the spider the site, how big it is and how deeply they crawl you should probably expect some temporary pain while the search engines catch back up with your changes. Temporary being anywhere from a few weeks to months.

If you have no choice but to go that route you'll at least want to use a 301 redirect to point from each of the old pages to the most appropriate new page.

[Therese Lane]

If you have no choice but to go that route you'll at least want to use a 301 redirect to point from each of the old pages to the most appropriate new page.

Hello,

Okay. So, you can redirect each page w/in an existing site to particular pages w/in another/new website. Good to know. With that said, how do you determine whether to use a 301 or a 302 redirect?


Let's say that I currently have several ecommerce sites (none of which are performing well in SERPs, but are doing fairly well in sales) that I will eventually be moving to one main portal site. Each of the former ecommerce sites will have their own sections w/in the portal site. In order to ensure a smooth transition from the ecommerce sites to the main portal site, would you recommend that I a.) do a 302 temporary redirect from each ecommerce site to the appropriate page w/in the portal site, b.) do a 301 redirect, considering the existing sites don't have any incoming links and not so great rankings, or c.) do you suggest something completely different?...

I just read Scottie Claiborne's article "Switching to a New Domain Without Losing Your Google Rankings" and she recommended a 302 over a 301; however, I'm not sure if this is the right scenario to apply this to.

I'm attempting to learn more about SEO in general, and as I read about the topic I try to apply it to other situations I may run into down the road. And, right now, I'd love some feedback to know whether or not I'm grasping the concept. Your thoughts/advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you.

[Randy]

Per Scottie's article, if the domain everything is being moved to is brand new and has not yet had a chance to emerge from Google's aging delay you'll want to use a 302.

For everything else you'll want to use a 301.

[Jill]

Since your old sites aren't doing well anyway, I'd go for the 301.