Hi,

My old site online art has decent search engine hits and has been up and running for a good few years.

My new site Wildlife Art has only been up a month or so and is still being added to as far as content and tweaks etc.

My question is - can I quickly get hits on my new site by permanently redirecting from my old site to my new one in some way? is it a permanent redirect or something?

I want to use my new sites domain name so it is not just a simple case of overwriting the old site.

I would also like to keep my old site running, and I have a spare domain which I could use for that I guess, then do a simple link to it from my new site.

Sounds complicated I know and I don't want to mess everything up

I would just like to know what you would all do in my position. Basically I want my new site to start bringing in some trade for me. I have added more links and one ways to me but that is going slow as I try to use only relevant sites.

Appreciate your help.

Jason

You can redirect an entire domain using a 301 redirect.

I am not sure whether it passes on the page name or not. You may only be able to pass all pages to the index page of the new site.

Make sure before you set a 301 full site redirect that you know the ip # the old control panel is located on or you may not be able to get back there to change it.

Your bookmark may be set to olddomain.com/cpanel (or some port). With the ip you can always type in ip#/cpanel and get to the right control panel.

Setting redirects for the individual pages in the site would be a sure fire method.

oldomain.com/page1.html redirected to newdomain/pagename.html

You can set these from your cpanel under the icon redirects. Try a test one before you do them all. Permanent = 301.

Thanks for the reply Colbyt, but you have completely lost me there.

My webhost is 1&1, is that where I will find this 301 redirect?

and will this benefit me as far as Google do you think?

Appreciate any help.

I will follow up on this thread later this afternoon. Since you are at one of my 3 least favored hosts, I will need to look something up.

BBL,

Since you are at 1&1 what you need to do is contact the support department and ask them how to set permanent (301) redirects for pages or your entire site.

They have a home-brewed control panel and only an experienced user of that panel is going to be able to help you. They may not even call them redirects but their support people should know what you what to do. You should be fine. I have actually heard pretty decent reports about support at 1&1.

Just pointing the old domain at the new domain is not enough. You might get penalized in the SE's for duplicate content. Make sure they understand that you want it to be reflected that the "content has been moved permanently" to the new location.

Post back and let us know how it turns out.

probably the dumbest thing I've heard in a while.

new site = aging delay

301 old site -> new site = new site & old site -> aging delay

swapping old site to different hostname also could equal 3 to 6 months maybe a year depending on whether hostname three had ever had links to it

So your "plan" could have all three sites dead in the (google) water for 9 to 12 months. All because you seem to assume that the domain name is important for SEO (which it isn't)

Colbyt:- Thanks for taking the time to research that for me

Chris:- Re: "Dumbest thing"

Exactly the reason I am posting on this forum, to get some answers from the people with MUCH more knowledge than myself, so that I DONT mess everything up. To make myself plain, my thoughts were this -

My old site sells mainly a CD to teach people how I paint. I earn a small amount from the sales of the CD's nothing more, but enough to want it to keep going for a little while longer (another year) hits to this site are reasonable (for search term "wildlife art").

My new site sells my paintings and prints, (I wanted to distance it for the, how to paint, site as I felt it made me look amateurish) it has only been up and running a short while, so hits form the search engines are nil.

I thought I may be able to redirect / swap around or something to get the google hits on my new site, instead of my old one, ie I want the new one to be the primary site getting the good hits, instead of the old, established site.

So.....if anyone would like to jump in and point me in the right direction it would be appreciated :-)

You are welcome.

Chris did have burr in his jockeys.

He also made some very valid points. On a page by page basis from old domain to new domain, the loss of time and ranking may not be that bad. Sitewide I think it will hurt you.

Why not just link to the new site. It may be ignored if they are on the same Ip but if you don't cross-link or have multiple links it should not hurt you.

My new site sells my paintings and prints, (I wanted to distance it for the, how to paint, site as I felt it made me look amateurish)

Actually you should be doing the exact opposite.
Information sites, as in your case how to paint, are always easier to build content for, get incoming links to and generally optimise than any commercially selling site is, or will be. It's the nature of the Internet and SEs. Why do you think people write articles or republish articles on their sites?

Integrate the two sites using the established sitename initially while starting a promotion for the new sitename, that is parked and pointed to the same content (there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty). When the new hostname starts to rank for phrases then set the redirects up.
Use the inherent value of a site that has paid (or partially paid) it's dues WRT the aging delay. DO NOT WASTE IT, an older site with existing links and SE history is now a valuable commodity for Google results.

Not a burr but it does bug me about people wanting to be changing hostnames for no valid reason. In the grand scheme of things domain names are not important for getting traffic, what is important is that they are memorable and can be branded.