I have a web site which is about 7 years old,
ww.itemsabout.com with a good rating and many links.
When I started with this web site, I was doing many
different things. Now I do more handcrafted things. So
Ipurchase a new domain name www.handcraftedsigns.com I
want to keep the two domain names and only
have one web site to maintain. But I donot want to
mess up my hits and rating. What I'm doing now is
redirecting www.handcraftedsigns.com to the old main site
www.itemsabout.com. I hope this is the correct way???

You're doing right if you want this stuff.

It sounds as though you are doing things right. By keeping the old domain name you don't lose any links or ranking, but the new domain is more targeted to people who are specifically looking for handcrafted items, so that will help too.

You don't say if you are planning to actually change the whole identity of the site over to reflect the new domain. I have done this once, and I think it can be done without causing problems if you do it slowly.

You might start out by adding some simple text to the site, if your title now is ItemsAbout, you may add in something like 'featuring HandCrafted Signs'. By making small changes over time (next step: ItemsAbout and HandCrafted Signs), you can slowly bring around the identity of the whole site. And again, by keeping both domains, you don't lose anything!

Hi,

You should use a 301 Permanent Redirect.

I'm not a techie so you should do a Google search to
learn about it.

You can start here:
http://www.gnc-web-creations.com/301-redirect.htm

Also, try asking your hosting company if they can help or do it for you.

Patrick

I must of made a mistake with the 301 redirect.my old
site which has many links and good rating is not index
now.The links are still there but not the index page
with a cache picture file. What I did was stopped and
remove the redirect scripts and made separate site
for now.I resubmitted itemsabout.com again and hope
that gooles re index my main page. What do you think.

Thanks for any suggestion.
Anthony

Anthony it looks like you're now redirecting the old domain to the new one and it also looks like the redirect is a 302 or temporary redirect. You want to make sure the redirect is a 301 or permanent redirect in order to keep the benefits you've gained from the old domain.

With the 301 you will probably lose some of the gains from the years for a time while the search engines sort things out, but a 301 is the only way to redirect one url to another and maintain those benefits.

If you want to redirect the new domain to the old one that's fine too. You can probably park the new domain in the hosting account for the older domain, but that will depend some on how your hosting account is set up and what other features come with it.

The key though is making sure any redirect is permanent/301.