New domain for established site

Posted At : October 10, 2007 9:43 AM
Related Categories: Online Strategy

There are many reasons for implementing server side redirects both temporary and permanent but whatever the reason caution should be exercised. A 301 redirect tells the search engines that a page or site has been permanently redirected and a 302 tell them that the move is temporary.

Imagine a company is re branding. As part of the re brand there may be a more appropriate domain name that is now available and would better reflect the image of the business online. But, the company already ranks well in the search engines for its main key phrases, so does it keep the existing domain which won't reflect the re brand and make product pages more appropriate or does it go the whole hog and shift to the new domain? Now, if you're just changing page names on the same domain, cleaning things up and pointing one page on your site to a new page, there's no problem. All of the off page work that's been done will retain its value with no long term negative impact on the SERPs.

Theoretically you should be able to implement the 301 from the old domain to the new domain, again retaining the value of the valuable off page work that's been done, but having tested the theory, there's a problem. By pointing the website at a new domain you're opening it up to the 'new site filters' (or dare I say sandbox effect in Google's case) and it will be filtered in the same way. There's no time frame to this and it really depends on how competitive the search terms are you are trying to target before you may or may not see a return to previous positions. Effectively you've started from scratch - Ouch!

If you're considering implementing a 301 to a new domain, you know the work that's been involved in getting your original rankings so I'm not going to go into what needs to be done here but it seems very strange that there's no way of differentiating between a completely new site and one that's been previously well established but simply undergone a name change or re brand.