New Host & Domain

Sully

Quick one. Whats the best option in terms of search engine performance if you end up getting a new domain name and move to a new host. For the old domain name - setup a redirect or would you just change the nameservers to point to the server?

pingpipe

Best option is to setup a 301 redirect for the "old" domain and you will keep any search engine rankings you have established for it.

Sully

pingpipe wrote: »

Best option is to setup a 301 redirect for the "old" domain and you will keep any search engine rankings you have established for it.

Okay but what about updating the title and description from the new site - does Google update this data? I thought changing nameservers might be the same as a simple redirect, as its just pointing to a new location rather than a new domain?

pingpipe

The new domain/website will be indexed separately. For example: there's an existing page named olddomain.com/sully.php that's indexed by Google. If you just change the nameservers for olddomain.com when I click on the link in Google results that goes to olddomain.com/sully.php it will give a 404 (Page not found) error message. Using a 301 redirect instead will address this and people will be sent to your new site.

Google will index the new site and rank it separately. There's some useful information on the Google webmaster blog that goes into good detail on how it all actually works.

blue4ever

Take it in steps - first you don't have to change name servers..its a new domain. In the Old domain you should set up a redirect from the old to the new.

IF the structure stays the same after the new domain name ie

olddomain.ie/product/stickittotyrone.html
newdomain.ie/product/stickittotyrone.html

then the redirect would be something like:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.ie/$1 [R=301,L]

That will preserve the directory structure and the redirect "simply" injects the new domain where the olds was, but keeps the structure after the/

The above code should not be taken as red - you'll have to test it!

Sully wrote: »

Okay but what about updating the title and description from the new site - does Google update this data? I thought changing nameservers might be the same as a simple redirect, as its just pointing to a new location rather than a new domain?

Google will begin to see the new pages (sitemap will aid this) and update them in time. Depending on how long you site is crawled the will depend on how long that will take to be indexed in G. Simply changing namservers wont do: in a few days time the url of olddomain.ie/product/stickittotyrone.html wont exist. You would either get the Google can be found page or a 404 page. On the latter, have a look at smashing magazine and their article and examples of 404 pages - really good.

Sully

The old website was only one page. It now has six.

Iv asked the original host setup the redirect as we have no access to that.