Due to limitations with my current hosting site I need to move to a different platform. My hold up has been moving the store. Since this must be done manually it is too time consuming to plan for it to all be done at once. I have about 1,000 items in the store and limited time.

Here’s what I’m thinking. Leave the current site in tack with the current address www.sitename.com. Then with another hosting site register and build the site with the domain name www.sitename2.com. If a customer lands on www.sitename.com and selects a product from the menu they will be directed to the store at the same site. If they want product information (that is not part of the store) they will be sent to www.sitename2.com. If they land on www.sitename2.com and want to purchase a product, they will be sent to www.sitename.com to complete the sale.

As time permits I will eventually migrate all to the new site.

Here’s my question. Will the google gods or other search engines penalize either address for this procedure? One of the biggest reasons that I must leave the current hosting is with all the limitations I’m being penalized for many things that are out of my control. Don’t want to spend time and money if it is not going to improve my rankings that have severely dropped in the last 30-60 days. Gotta fix it now – can’t put it off any longer.

Appreciate any input on this topic.
L. Giroir

You should be able to transfer your store to your new host and test the site using an ip address or temporaray url. When you are ready to go live with it you just amend the DNS to point your domian to the new host.


So long as the urls remain the same you 'shouldn't' have too much trouble with SE listing since the addresses won't have changed. If you start using a new domain name you are effectively starting from scratch.

The main problem I see is the pages at sitename2.com will duplicate all the pages at sitename.com other than the store. What you could do is only leave the store at sitename.com and move all of the information pages permanently to sitename2.com to avoid the duplication in content.

Then you would set up 301 redirects from the pages you remove at sitename.com and point them to the coresponding new pages at sitename2.com. The 301 redirect lets search engines know the page has permanently moved to the new url and any backlinks, PR, etc will get transferred to the new pages.

Also any visitor who would navigate to the old url for the moved pages will be taken to the new url for the page and still get to the right place. When you later move the store to sitename2.com you would want to set up 301 redirects to handle those pages as well.

Thanks to both of you for the input. Steve, thanks for the detail. You've given me the solution to keeping the original address live and accessible for any search results that are out there while I'm trying to get 'stuff' migrated and a way for both sites to exist simultaneously. Appreciated your input.
L. Giroir

Glad to help. If for any reason you do see a little drop with the search engines it might take them a little bit to sort everything out, though I'm not sure if it will be an issue.

Found another Limitation on my current host. think this is #437..... I don't have access to the apache files to put a redirect in. Any suggestions on how I can accomplish the same given that I can only control html and js at the page level?

There are a variety of ways you can set up the redirect. I'd recommend writing and uploading a .htaccess file. If you've never created one a .htaccess file is a text file, but there's no extension on the end of it. You'd want to load it the root directory of sitename.com.

SEOmoz has a Guide to Applying 301 Redirects in Apache. It should have everything you need to write the .htaccess file and has some examples. I took a look and they show the case where your redirecting files from one site to another.