301 Re-direct help

[Prime85]

Hello Mozzers,

I have a technical question that perhaps someone has experience with and can help with.

I currently have 2 e-commerce websites:

SITE-A.COM (original site) & SITE-B.COM (new site)

SITE-B.COM is the newer site that has a lot of new products and new features and great content and is very user friendly.

We are thinking about funneling all of our visitors and traffic to SITE-B.com since it is the better experience for the users ...

the question is this:

If we want to 301 redirect all traffic from Site-A.com to Site-B.com ... where do we initiate those redirect requests?  Would it be on the server for Site-A.com?  If so, would i have to keep that server up and running forever if i don't want to lose the re-directs?  Also, how do i do this properly without violating Google's guidelines?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

[AjazMozPro]

Hi

From my understanding of above, SiteA and SiteB are setup on separate servers and I appreciate you won't want to be running two servers for the sake of keeping redirects alive. Firstly, I would recommend making sure you have a full and up to date backup of the sites.

Server 1: 
Setup 301 redirects for everything from DomainA > DomainB

Server 2:
Create the Addon Domain entry for DomainA to point to DomainB
Setup 301 redirects for everything from DomainA > DomainB

Now change the nameservers for DomainA from Server 1 > Server 2.

• At this stage, you may experience some downtime whilst the domain propagates but because everything is setup and ready, any downtime should be minimal.

Once the domain has fully propagated, verify in Server 1 stats that the server is no longer receiving requests for that Domain to serve data and that all requests are being served from Server 2. <--- On confirmation of this, you can then go ahead and delete all data from Server 1 and shut it down.

Now everything is being served from Server 2. Monitor for any new 404 errors that may occur, in case you missed out redirecting any content and get these fixed with redirects as soon as possible.

Providing the structure of the URLs is the same, you shouldn't really encounter any 404 errors and from this point on, the 301 redirects only serve the purpose of maintaining any link juice from backlinks and ensuring your customers who are finding your site through referral links are landing on the correct pages. - If a user visits your site by entering the domain directly, the server will automatically direct them from DomainA to DomainB and from that point on, clicking any links within the site should keep the user on DomainB without having to perform redirects.

Then head over to Google Console and in the configuration tab for your site, there will be an option to notify Google about the "Change of Address" - complete this section.

Finally, to avoid any confusion from your customers I would recommend releasing a notice of some kind to inform your visitors that you have migrated to the new site.

I hope this information is helpful to you and of course if you have any questions at all, feel free to get in touch.

I hope you have a Great Christmas & a Happy New Year.

Best Regards

Ajaz

[Prime85]

Thank you so much for the detailed explanation.

I will check this out and get back to you with any questions or to report how this worked.

Thanks again - Happy Holidays!

[Prime85]

Actually, just for clarification:

Both domain names are registered at GoDaddy

Both domain-A & domain-B are hosted at Nexcess (on separate servers)

You wrote: “Now change the nameservers for DomainA from Server 1 > Server 2.”

Do you mean by that… to point both Domain names to the same name server that Domain-B is on?

Thanks again

[regal_kyle]

Not sure if this is the way it should exactly be handled, but here are some thoughts for consideration:

1. I'd consider pointing IP address of domain-A to IP address of domain-B, then set up a general 301 domain redirect for domain-A -> domain-B and then do 301 redirects per URL from domain-A to domain-B as applicable/relevant. The redirects would be setup to be managed on domain-b, as domain-a would be pointing to domain-b's server.

2. Since you're effectively "changing site address" here, so you'd want to ensure you have both sites and all versions setup in GSC (domain-a.com, www.domain-a.com, https://domain-a.com, https://www.domain-a.com domain-b.com, www.domain-b.com, etc., etc.) and then initiate a change of address for domain-a.com to go to domain-b.com.

Cheers