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Written by Melissa Rood March 28, 2006 Hi, I'm new to the list - I hope you can help me. Foreseeably, we need to move our website from our current domain to a new domain name hosted elsewhere. A 301 redirect (as recently discussed here in the LED) would be ideal except our current host allows no access to .htaccess files, no cgi-bin, no control panel, etc. it's really basic webspace and HTML, CSS, and JS are the only tools available. Any kind of HTML link placed on the old domain would redirect visitors and bots to our new domain but we run the risk of the old site and the new site being in Google's index at the same time. Our site isn't particularly optimised yet so losing ranking is not such a concern but we don't want our new domain being blacklisted for duplicate content. How likely is it that we'll be judged to have duplicate content in this scenario? best regards, Melissa Rood playing-out.co.uk Written by David Spahr March 29, 2006 I'm curious about why you are changing the domain name. The one you have seems good. You could move the obsolete domain to your new host. Before you change over to the new domain, move the obsolete domain and get Internic to point to it at that server. Then strip out the content (so there is no duplication) and create the redirect there. Then put up your new site at the same time. You would need to run the old domain with redirect for a while until the indexes catch up and your customers have updated their bookmarks. It would cost a little bit extra to do but not much if you have chosen the right host. You could probably phase out the old domain (or figure out something interesting to do with it) in a few months. David Spahr antique-photography.com Written by Ron Coble March 28, 2006 Hi Melissa, You do not need to have control panel access to place an .htaccess file on your site. You can FTP it to your site - I have done it many times: - Open Notepad - Put the 301 commands or whatever you want to do - Save it as htaccess.txt no period before it - Upload it to your root directory (where your HTML files are sitting) using your FTP program - Then using your FTP programs "Rename" option - rename it to htaccess by adding the period and deleting the .txt and Save it. Last, but not least, be sure to test it. Hope this helps. Ron Coble Coble International - International Marketing Services Written by Reg Charie March 29, 2006 Melissa, Do a redirect at the registrar level. Registrars like GoDaddy allow you to setup permanent redirects. You can even "mask" the redirect so that people see the old domain name, not the new. (Not sure what effect this has on SE Listings, if any. I don't think it will matter as only visitors looking for the old site will be using this.) Thank You, Reg Charie dotcom-productions.com Written by Tom Aman March 29, 2006 If your old domain does not contain too many pages, you could use "client-pull" to redirect visitors to the new domain: Replace every page on the old domain with a page that contains, between the <.HEAD> and <./HEAD>, the tag: <META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="x; URL=http://foo.bar/blatz.html"> The URL value would be the appropriate page on the new site, "x" represents a delay time in seconds. This causes the browser to get the page at the URL location after "x" seconds. For visual reference, to call the attention of visitors to the old domain that you have moved, in the body of the page on the old site place some text such as: We have a new domain, "foo.bar". You will be redirected to the new location in a few seconds or <.a xhref="http://foo.bar/blatz.html">click here<./a> to go there now. This lets visitors know that you have moved, gets them painlessly to the new location, and avoids any Google problems. Presumably, the old site will just disappear after a month or two. Tom Aman Aman Software Written by Lorelle Smith March 30, 2006 > Registrars like GoDaddy allow you > to setup permanent redirects. - Reg Charie Not exactly true. A permanent redirect is a 301. GoDaddy's forwarded domains report as a 302: a temporary redirect. > You can even "mask" the redirect so that > people see the old domain name, not the new. This could lead to unwanted results. I ran into some trouble a few years ago with one of my sites. There is a common misspelling so naturally I registered that domain as well and had my web host "park" it on top of the main domain. Parking also "masks" the domain name in the address bar. There are two ways the major search engines like to find out about a new site: by following a link, or by spying on users who have downloaded the engine's toolbar. So Google either found a misspelled link somewhere or someone with G's toolbar misspelled the domain when typing it. Google then indexed every page the misspeller visited -- under the misspelled domain name instead of the correct name! Naturally, this presents a fractured view of the site. Google didn't know I had tons of great content on ONE site, because it saw this as TWO separate sites. Nowadays we all know that "content is king" so that was not a good thing. To solve the problem, I used GoDaddy forwarding without masking. That's how I found out it gives a 302 instead of a 301. It hasn't hurt it any, though; today there are zero pages indexed in Google under the wrong name. I do have to check periodically to be sure other sites are linking to the correct version of the name. (I don't worry about people with an engine's toolbar visiting under the misspelled name, because the engines no longer seem to index sites that don't have at least one other site linking to them.) Lorelle Smith, SEO/Internet Marketing Consultant keywordsmith.com Comments (0)
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