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Yeah I knew they were doing it with books, just wasn't aware about PDFs in general til Keri pointed it out.

Also - if the only change is the domain name, (URLs are otherwise identical, content is otherwise identical), then you may see more of a hit at Bing than Google simply because Bing emphasizes age of content a bit more. Also I'd highly suggest a comprehensive link building initiative as the new domain goes live so while you're working to get as many existing links pointing directly (to bypass 301s on those 3rd party authority signals), you'll also want to have a variety of new quality links to show that "this new domain really is still authoritative and trustworthy".  That should help ensure any hit you take is not as long as it would otherwise be. I'd also encourage a press release sent out through PRWeb.com or PRNewswire.com, and social push announcing the change.  All these are as much for signals confirming it's a legit transfer as they are for other SEO reasons.

Looks like not to many links and the onpage kind of low in density? no exact matches on most these keywords? if you do a google search in quotes "keywords" followed by site operator site:website.com like Your search - "linux hosting company chennai" site:indyawebspace.com - did not match any documents. windows hosting company chennai" site:indyawebspace.com   no results if you do a search linux hosting company chennai site:www.indyawebspace.com in google you see this rank 1st <cite>www.indyawebspace.com/linuxhosting.php   on page density is better</cite> <cite>www.indyawebspace.com ranks second</cite> look a proximity if you look "web hosting in chennai" also you dont see it in the remote looking for external references for example "web hosting in chennai" "indyawebspace.com" -site:indyawebspace.com you also dont see too many. Did you ever have the location and keywords in a header tag.

I would mark this question as answered, it seems that a lot of great minds have come together and given a lot of really accurate responses. It just keeps others from re-answering.

It is my understanding that canonical tags help prevent duplicate content by telling the crawl bot where the original content exists. Say I want to repost an article from Seomoz on my site that I think my readers would find useful. If I did this without a canonical tag Google would penalize me for posting unoriginal content. To avoid this I would include the original URL back to the Seomoz post in canonical tag to tell Google where I am getting this content. An internal example would be on pages that include URL parameters (pagers for example: www.example.com/product-page and www.example.com/product-page?page1. Here you would want to include a canonical tag to the clean URL). I believe nofollow tags alone don't help with duplicate content issues. You need to also include a noindex tag. Combined, this is an aggressive and effect way to keep duplicate content out of Google's index and avoid penalizations. Hope that helped explain things a little better! Andrew

Thanks you Egol

Hmm, so you could be held to ransom for your own site? I'm not saying for one minute that the company is bad or anything but the problem with this type of thing is never about how much they charge, it's about the level of service... if staff changes or they take on a bigger client, or any number of things that result in you getting low service, what are you ever going to do about it in that situation? What if the site and CMS used is no good for SEO purposes, what if they don't allow changes and don't allow others to access the source code. What if things go wrong with hosting or anything else to do with the site? I would just get the whole thing built in an open source CMS by someone and hosted somewhere you have full access to if I were you.

Hi there, I am actually in the exact same situation as you are in for 2 of my clients, but they are doing a re-design not for conversion issues, but just updating the site and moving it to a cms. I got the client to map out all the new pages so we can put all 301 redirects in place, especially for pages that will no longer exist, we make sure we point them to the right category page. Also we try to contact as much of the webmasters from where we have links from as possible to point the links to the new url, because you don't want your links to lose value due to redirects. Keep an eye on Google WMT after you made the migration to make sure no errors come out I guess, I don't see much issues with site migration if you can keep urls the same but you never know.

One more vote for Wordpress. If it's good enough for some of the major SEO companies out there to use as their blogging platform then it's good enough for a little pest control guy like me.

We had 301s for about 6 months, and the old URLs did not disappear from google. Thats why we decided to change them to 404s, with the thinking that Google might remove them quicker. But the number of links from sub-domains just keeps on growing. I am worried that by having these problem urls listed in the robots.txt actually prevents google from following them and seeing that it should be removed and that it returns a 404