Moving a website from one domain to another

[Sparkstone]

Hi Guys,

I figured I'd investigate this fully before potentially ruining a client's traffic.

The rundown:Two websites; one is an ecommerce store and the other is just a brochure website which has references to the ecommerce store.

The ecommerce store is hosted on a server we control whereas the brochure one isn't, the URL for the brochure store is nice and simple which is the reason for the switch, as the ecommerce URL is very long and hard to remember.

Now from an SEO point of view will it be a case of 301 redirecting every URL from the old domain name to the new one one or is there an easier option?

Any tips or links to more information would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Dan

[SEOAndy]

Basically a 301 redirect is the best option, if you are literally moving a whole domain and the urls will stay the same (save for the domain name) you can use the below

 <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$ [OR]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$
  RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule> 

Thats assuming you are running apache.

[PaddyDisplays]

A recent blog post that should help you

http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects.

Your situation should make the move easy enough as the urls will be the same bar the root domain. This can easily be done in htaccess, here is a guide:

http://www.orderofbusiness.net/blog/redirect-old-domain-to-new-domain-via-htaccess/

edit: Andy beat me to the punch

[Marvo]

I have a similar issue and found this thread - if the previous url has identical content to the new url, does the redirect solve problems that might arise with duplicate content?

[PaddyDisplays]

short answer: yes

[Everett]

And don't forget to look into the Change of Address feature in Google Webmasrter Tools:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83106