Experience/suggestions in redirecting old URLs (from an existing site) to new URLs under a new domain

[esiow2013]

Please share your experiences/suggestions in redirecting a set of pages (10,000 or more pages/URLs) from an existing domain to new URLs under a new domain.

Thanks in advance!

[ocelot]

Hi

You will need to create a redirect using a .htaccess file

This allows you to redirect your entire website to your new domain Redirect 301 / http://www.myexample.com/

Redirect old file path to new file path

Redirect /olddirectory/oldfile.html http:/myexample.com/newdirectory/newfile.html

[AlanMosley]

If the site structure is the same, then a simple redirect from oldDomain.com to newDomaina.com will do the trick.

If the site structure is different, then I would look at your external links, if a page has links then redirect it to a page with same or simular content on new site, those that don't have external links I would not bother wit there is no value in redirecting them.

[esiow2013]

Why is there no "301" in the following unlike in the first sample:

Redirect /olddirectory/oldfile.html http:/myexample.com/newdirectory/newfile.html

[DaveSottimano]

Just to add to Alan's answer,  and this is from pure experience:

1. You'll likely see a "down" period. Expect organic traffic to drop for a few weeks and hopefully get back to previous level or better. If you rely on organic, up your spend on PPC during this period
2. Do not redirect internal pages to the root. domainA.com/page should redirect to another inner page. Don't start redirecting groups of pages to the new root.
3. Like Alan said, pages without external links are not worth redirecting. Make sure you get  all of your links from OSE, Majestic, Ahrefs and WMT to get a decent picture. Ensure you're redirecting to similar content too!
4. Change the site address in WMT, verify new site in WMT - watch this like a hawk, especially crawl errors.
5. Once the new site is up, submit your XML sitemaps to WMT.
6. Triple check your robots.txt, and other robots directives - I've see too many sites go up with NOINDEX and full robots.txt blocks.
7. Fetch pages in WMT to ensure you're getting 200 response codes on your most important / new pages
8. Recrawl all your old pages (that you've redirected) to ensure they return a 301 > 200. No chains, just 1 301.

There's probably more, but those are the essentials.