How to do a site migration followed by a domain migration and avoid 301 redirect chains?

[brad-causes]

Hi all,

The current roadmap for our Eng team has us performing a site migration (redirecting one subfolder to another subfolder) and then a domain migration shortly after. The way I see it, I have 2 scenarios (the 1st involves the site migration THEN the domain migration and the 2nd is the site migration and domain migration being done simultaneously):

1. olddomain.com/subfolder-old to olddomain.com/subfolder-new THEN olddomain.com/subfolder-new to newdomain.com/subfolder-new AND olddomain.com/subfolder-old to newdomain.com/subfolder-new

2. olddomain.com/subfolder-old to newdomain.com/subfolder-new

I also understand that there are two best practices for a domain migration and they are 1) keep everything the same that you can to help Google understand it is the same page, just on a different domain and 2) avoid chain redirects.

As you can imagine, scenario 1 requires more Eng costs than scenario 2. So, my question is, is scenario 2 a perfectly viable option or should I make the push to go for scenario 1?

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

[Chris.Menke]

Brad,

Not reading any time frames into the scenarios, option 2 is your quickest, easiest, and most direct route from where you are now to where you want to be after the domain migration.  As far as Google or SEO is concerned, there's no need for the intermediate step of redirecting the directory and then redirecting it again.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Is there a reason you are considering option 1?  Option 2 is simpler to implement and doesn't chain the redirects.  Unless there's some other, non-SEO reason for considering option 1, I'd go with the second option.

If you are considering option 1 because you want to only be changing the domain and not also changing the subfolder when you do the domain migration, I wouldn't worry about it.  As long as you are setting up 301 redirects for each page to redirect to the new URL for that page, Google and Bing can understand that out just fine.

• Kurt Steinbrueck