Migrating WP to a new Domain without loosing SEO stats

[NikitaG]

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[magicrob]

Hi Nikita

It looks like you've redirected some pages, but not all.

There are a number of pages still indexed in Google for the old .co.za domain, and those pages are still available when clicked on. You can see these here:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflashpoets.co.za&pws=0

So you'll need to redirect all pages from the old site, either to the equivalent page on the new site, or to the homepage on the new site (if no equivalent exists).

For example you should redirect http://flashpoets.co.za/news/ to http://flashpoets.com/photography-news/

Here's an overview of what to do:

• Make a list of all of the pages and folders from the old website
• Make a list of the pages and folders on the new website
• Decide which old pages/folders you wish to redirect to new pages/folders
• Create a series of 301 redirects to add to your .htaccess file (see Learn Redirection)
• Also fill out the Change Of Address section in Google Webmaster Tools

Google have a good guide that you can follow at Webmaster Help here.

I hope that's helpful

[Clickatell2]

Hi Nikita

If you using Wordpress on the co.za domain, you can use the redirection plugin (http://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/) to redirect all old urls to new.

Run Integrity,a tool to get all the urls on the site with 404 errors  (http://peacockmedia.co.uk/integrity/) export to csv and then open in excel. Then in the Excel document create another column which will then be the new url next to old one.

You can then upload this csv into the redirection plugin on the .com domain. This way you wouldn't miss any urls but also setup Webmaster tools for both sites so you can monitor 404s.

Once Google has indexed the .com urls you can delete the .co.za from Google's index.

One question: From what I can see your site is primarily for South African Audience. Why switch to .com in the first place?

[NikitaG]

Thank you Lesley, 
You mentioned some really helpful links,

I got the .com for 2 reasons, 1. is so that I can make s a seamless transition form the shared hosting, and 2 is, believe it or not, having a .com makes you sound official. sometimes we still use the South African Extension sometimes.  But our next step is to make online tutorials, and having a .com will help them to spread, being less limited to an geographical area.

Here is a question:
Do you think we will get worse local exposure for having a .com?

thanks so much
Nikita

[Clickatell2]

Hi Nikita

If the co.za site objective is a brochure site and focused on attracting business in the SA market then keep the co.za site but make sure that the content is not duplicate to .com. The blogposts you have about "Burger King Cape Town" is perfect, since its related to the local market.

For .com you want online tutorials so the focus of the 2 sites are different and therefore the keywords co.za and .com needs to rank for are different.

Hope this helps.