Domain Change: Leave The Old Domain Homepage Up

[JessieT]

We are going to be redesigning our website and switching to a new domain.

I think we will set up a permanent 301 redirect from each page of the old domain to a page on the new domain. We would like to leave the old domain homepage up with all content removed and have a link pointing to the new domain. Is there any SEO harm to leaving the old domain homepage up?

Thank you!

Jessie

[irvingw]

What is your reasoning for wanting to do that?

Your homepage is your highest PR page so you should 301 redirect it to the new homepage and users will get to your site without having to click.

[Highland]

I find that 301s are not just good for SEO, but end users as well. I really find it so much neater when the people who own a website make sure that I get directed to where I was trying to go instead of leaving it up to me to click there. Remember that if you do it the way you mention that you're also giving users an option to click something you don't want them to: the close button!

[JessieT]

Our thought was since the old domain has a lot of SEO credibility it would be good to keep a  few resource pages that direct to the new domain. Is this incorrect thinking? Would it be better to let go of the old domain and permanently 301 redirect the whole website, passing 90%+ of the link juice to the new domain?

I agree that from the usability stand point that it would be better to permanent 301 redirect the old homepage to the new domain.

[ThompsonPaul]

You absolutely want to redirect the entire old domain and all of its pages to the new site, Jessie. Under no circumstances is it a good idea to leave the old homepage or resource pages live.

If you were to do that, you would be splitting the authority between the two sites and neither one of them would be strong enough to rank well. (The split sites would also likely confuse your users.)

There's actually quite a bit of technical work to be done to implement this kind of domain change. Here's an extensive SEOMoz post on the steps to implement and monitor a domain migration. And here's a great migration checklist infographic. You're going to want to get  as much of this right as possible, as there can be considerable risk when doing this kind of major change. And you'll want to have good monitoring in place so you catch and fix any problems/glitches that sneak through.

Hope that helps?

Paul

P.S. Just to be clear - if you "left the homepage up" but had a 301-redirect on it, nobody would ever see the old homepage anyway. They would be forwarded to the new page as if the old page didn't exist

[ThompsonPaul]

In a recent statement (sorry, don't have the link to hand) Google's Matt Cutts indicated that 301-redirects pass the same amount of rank influence as a normal link does. So there'd be no benefit to using links instead of 301s anyway.

Paul