Redirecting the domain

Posted: September 16th, 2008 | Author: Mihai Bojin | Filed under: Google, SEO, Search engines | Tags: domain, fast inclusion, Google, htaccess, redirect, SEO, SERP |

For those who don’t know what redirection is, there are a lot of helpful resources out there; try Wikipedia for example.

Google published a redirection best practices tutorial in April about moving pages around. Let me sum it up in a short list:

• Use 301 redirects; start small with a couple of pages in the begining and after you check that it works go further step by step until you redirect your old domain to the new one.
• Don’t do both a redesign and a full domain redirection at the same time
• Check on site and off site links, changing them accordingly to point to the new domain
• Keep control of your old domain for at least 180 days.

The trick here is to redirect traffic from an older domain to a new one without losing standings on the SERPs and traffic coming to your domain. It is harder than it seems, but not really that hard.

I tried this technique with one of my domains and now I’m sharing the results !

Everybody fears and avoids redirecting domains because of the most probable loss of traffic.

Let me tell you how I did it:

• I had a site with around 2500 unique visitors per week
• I wanted to change it’s domain name so I did a 1 on 1 redirect to the new domain; I did not proceed with caution 1 page at a time, one directory at a time; that’s because I knew what I was doing, the domain name was coded in my configuration script and once I changed it all of the site’s internal links were updated to the new ones.
• I did not move the site to a different server (in my opinion this is demonstrating to Google that you own both domains)
• I even left the site in the same directory on the server and I implemented the 1-1 redirect within the .htaccess file; it’s important to keep the old site registered with Google Analytics and also keep it’s sitemap right where it were; because I had the same directory for both old and new domains I had to create some custom htaccess rules:
• I didn’t contact the sites that had outbound links to the old domain; I just left them as is, mainly because they were not high quality links and partly because I was lazy

# Old files that need be kept on the domain
#Google webmaster tools verification file

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/googlea000011112222.html$     [OR]

#Sitemap file
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/smap.xml.gz$        [OR]

#Sitemap index file
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/smap_complete_idx.xml$

#Any other files that you want kept accesible on the old domain (without redirecting them) you will have to place
#above in a RewriteCond line ending with an [OR]

#Serve the requested URL on the old domain
RewriteRule (.*) $1 [L]

#www to non-www redirects and old to new domain redirect
#I wanted to use the non-www form for the new domain so I redirected all other forms to example-new.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com    [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com    [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example-new.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://example-new.com/$1 [R=301,L]

• The old domain was indexed in Google for about 9 months; the new one was bough one day prior to the redirect, so it was virgin: no links to it, no Google history etc

 

Okay, now come the facts:

• The old domain had around 2500 uniques per week (measured one week before the change) with 10,000 page views
• I pulled the redirection hard, not doing baby steps but Titanic sailing in Googly waters
• After around 4 hours of the initial redirection and listing of the new domain sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools, the site appears in Google results with around 500pages indexed. I was shocked ! It took 4 hours to add this new virgin domain to Google
• 6 weeks later, the new domain pulls in 2000-2100 unique visitors with 6000 page views per week
• In the meantime I lost control of the old domain, so that’s another thing on Google’s list I haven’t respected; right now there is only the new domain online
• In these 6 weeks, GoogleBot visited the new domain through redirects and added pages from the new site at an incredible rate; after this small timespam the new domain has around 40k pages indexed, while the old domain even if it doesn’t work anymore still retains 30k pages (it had around 70k before the redirection and Google was dropping around 2500pages per week but now it stopped dropping)
• I also have to note that after the first three weeks Google had in it’s index around 30k pages indexed for each domain

 

So what can we learn from this ?

1. A full domain to domain redirection has costed me around 20% of the traffic which is neither little or big
2. If you can be sure that the internal links are updated when you redirect, you can start redirecting all at once
3. If you want to get a new domain indexed in Google, get an older one and redirect all traffic from it to valid pages on the new domain! It took 4 hours to get my new domain listed in Google!
4. I guess that if you have enough traffic on a group of pages, you can pull this fast Google inclusion trick by only redirecting a part of an existing domain (maybe even for a small time). I wasn’t able to test this because I lost control of the old domain, but will test it with the next opportunity
5. Also this seems a method of splitting the traffic from one domain into 2 domains. Because Google doesn’t delete a page from the old domain immediately after indexing it on the new domain, you could get away with more summed up total traffic on both domains; I will test this whenever I’ll get a chance

Finishing up, I am really curios of the new domains PageRank at the next TBPR update. I will post the findings. Be sure to check back.
 

If you have any information that you’re willing to share on this subject, please comment on this post !

 

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