Rerouting and SEO

[Michelle0821]

I have the urls urlA.com (est 2010) and urlB.com (est 2015). The newest (siteB.com) is currently redirected to urlA.com.

For branding purposes, I think it is important to market and direct traffic to urlB.com (the newest).

What effect will it have on SEO if I make a change to switch those...and have urlA.com (which older site - 2015) redirected to urlB.com?.

[danwebman]

If you keep both domains but 301 redirect URLA.com to URLB.com Google will give you the credit for your old domain.

Also ensure pages are also 301 redirected on the new URL.

[Vijay-Gaur]

As for URL transfer Dave Nash's answer is perfect, you would get the authority for URLA.com when you 301 redirect it to URLB.com.

You also need to consider following process for transferring the authority of existing pages of URLA.com to new domain URLB.com

• Try to map each URL of existing website(at least the important ones) with 301 redirects to new domain URL equivalent. (example : > About-us page to be mapped with About-us page on new domain ). This will transfer most of the SEO value and authority to the new domain URLs and to the right pages.

• Register and verify your old domain and new domain with Google Webmaster Tools.

• Create a custom 404 page for the old domain which suggests visiting new domain.

• In a development environment, test the redirects from the old domain to the new domain. Ideally, this will be a 1:1 redirect. (http://www.example-old-site.com/...to http://www.example-new-site.com/...)

• 301 redirect your old domain to your new domain.

• Submit your old sitemap to Google and Bing. The submission pages are within Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Center (This step will make the engines crawl your old URLs, see that they are 301 redirects and change their index accordingly.)

• Fill out the Change of Address form in Google Webmaster Tools.

• Create a new sitemap and submit it to the engines. (This will tell them about any new URLs that were not present on the old domain)

• Wait until Google Webmaster Tools updates and fix any errors it indicates in the Diagnostics section.

• Monitor search engine results to make sure new domain is being properly indexed.

I hope this helps, let me know via your response if you have further questions.

Regards,

Vijay