Renaming your domain from an existing live domain and SEO implications - Please Help *shudder*

[SoutherlySwell]

Please see the details below.

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Site B: http//www.southerncircle.com/ is our original and has the best DA but is out of date and pretty clunky.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.

[FedeEinhorn]

This should be of great help: http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition

[AdeLewis]

Hi Patrick.

Here's what I would do:-

1. Carry out a site crawl of http://southerncircle.com and make a record of all of the URL's. If you don't have any software for doing this then use ScreamingFrog - http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ - There's also a really good guide for using ScreamingFrog here - http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide.

2. Make sure that both of the domains are set-up and verified in Google Webmaster Tools for both www. and non-www.

3. Make full back-ups of both your http://southerncircle.com and your http://south-africa-holiday.mobi domains (database and files) keep these on file just in case you need them again.

4. Migrate your http://south-africa-holiday.mobi site over to your http://southerncircle.com domain hosting account.

5. Add a site redirect to the .htaccess file in the root of the http://south-africa-holiday.mobi domain. For Joomla just add this :-

Options +FollowSymLinks 
RewriteEngine on
redirect 301 / http://www.southerncircle.com

The above will move your .mobi site over to the .com and make sure than anyone visiting the .mobi site will redirect correctly. You now need to make sure that you keep any of the link equity that you had in the .com site.

6. From the list of URLs that you took in step 1 you need to work out the most relevant page on the new site to redirect site visitors to. Within the .htaccess file of the .com domain you now need to set-up redirects for all of these URL's. A brief visit to Google will show you how to set these redirects up but basically:-

redirect 301 /old-page http://southerncircle.com/new-page

This should look after all of the redirects but just to make sure it is worth while just checking that you haven't missed out any important pages that have links pointing to them by carrying out an orphaned link check - http://www.teapotcreative.com/blog/entry/finding-and-fixing-orphaned-links-using-majestic-excel-and-screaming-frog

7. Inform Google of a site address change via Google webmaster Tools.

8. Carry out a canonicalisation check on the .com domain - http://www.ragepank.com/redirect-check/ - and fix any issues.

9. Add the new site to a Moz Campaign to check for any site errors.

[SoutherlySwell]

This is totally awesome response! straight forward and systematic!  Thank you soo much for this. I'm going to leave the question up for a bit longer to get more feedback but this is exactly what my research has told me to do ..just not so succinctly.

[socialengaged]

Hello

You may also want to try rel="canonical" (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en) or find out some better services for redirection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection#URL_redirection_services)

Also, and anyway, if you would like to keep your page rank, domain authority, and url, i would also suggest that you can just re write (by copy and paste) the whole best website code and structure as well as content, and have it all on the old domain. It seems to me the best solution, at least unless its not to hard to re create the website..

hope it helped

eugenio