I want to swop a site to an existing domain. i.e. it was http://A.com and now want it to be B.com...please help

[SoutherlySwell]

The company I have started working for as two main websites. The main website (A) is out of date and not very functional but has the companies prime domain name. The other site (B) has their ecommerce engine. I'd like to make B the prime site i.e. take over A's domain name. Huge warning bells are going off  regarding the SEO of this decision. Any advice or suggestions in how to go about this without destroying the company's SEO would be greatly valued.

[Chris.Menke]

That's not a problem.  Before the move, document the pages on website A that are receiving traffic from search engines and map each to pages on site B that have similar content so that you can 301 redirect that traffic from the old urls to the new ones.  Using OSE, document which URLs have external links going to them so you can 301 those to similar resources on the new site.

Here's a  guide from google that will also help with the move:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83105?hl=en

[SEO5Team]

Hi Patrick,

Here's a 301 checklist that might help you.

Cheers,

SEO5

[ChickChick]

I think there's something in Google Webmaster tools where you can tell it that you are switching domains - you verify both domains.  But also do the 301 redirects

Good luck!

[SoutherlySwell]

Hi thanks for the reply. This is pretty new to me so I probably need to explain  further:

Site A: http://south-african-holiday.mobi is an existing site that is our best site. It is Joomla 3.1 and runs all our ecommerce.

Site B: http//www.southerncircle.com/ is our original and has the best DA but is out of date and pretty clunky.  joomla 1.5 and all bookings (tour site) are redirected to Site A for processing.

Instead of redesigning the Site A I'd like to change the domain name of http://south-african-holiday.mobi -> http://southerncircle.com

So far my reading and research (Thanks MOZ for awesome forum!) has provided me with:

1. Do the SEO groundwork. i.e. remove dead links from both sites. Delete useless content and generally tidy up both sites.

2. Map all pages from site a: http://southerncircle.com -> http://south-africa-holiday/ so that the existing pages that have good ranking will have a home on the new site.

3. When ready do a small sample 301 redirect from: http://southerncircle.com to http://south-africa-holiday.mobi.

4. arghhhh now I'm stuck ..... If I redirect to this site then I lose my http://southerncircle.com domain which is what I want to keep....I just want the .mobi site to move to the southerncircle.com site....

I don't consider myself totally thick but this is really confuseing the *$%# out of me

PLEASE could you give me some insight here. I'm sure it has been done before without completely losing the sites seo ranking and sending my site into SEO oblivion.

If there are any JOOMLA gurus that have done this I'd love to hear from you as well.

Many thanks in advance.

[SoutherlySwell]

Thanks very much for you reply. I'm adding it to my arsenal of tricks in the buildup

[Chris.Menke]

Patrick, as  I understand what you want to accomplish, the point 3. you mention above is backwards.  The (sample) 301s you want to put in place are from pages on south-africa-holiday.mobi. to southerncircle.com.  Here are some more resources for you

• http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects
• Redirection - SEO Best Practices - Moz