IT want to do a name server redirect

[CommT]

Hi,

I am in a little bit of a pickle, and hope that you clever people can help me...

A little background:

In April this year we relaunched one of our brands as a standalone business. I set up page to page 301 redirects from the old website to the new branded domain. From an SEO perspective this relaunch went amazingly smoothly - we only lost around 10% of traffic and that was just for a couple of months. We now get more traffic than ever before. Basically it's all going swimmingly.

I noticed yesterday that the SSL certificate on the old domain has expired, so I asked IT to repurchase one for us to maintain the 301 redirects. IT are saying that they would prefer to do a name server redirect instead, which would remove all the page to page 301s.  They are saying that this would maintain the SEO. As far as I am aware this wouldn't. Please can someone help me put together a polite but firm response to basically say no?

Thanks, I really welcome and appreciate your help on this!

Amelia

[MickEdwards]

You will lose the page to page 301 passing link value.

I would just point out to them the importance of maintaining/developing links at a deeper level in the site, even throw them a couple of example URLs if possible.  If they don't get it, turn the table and ask them to explain how doing a name server redirect will maintain the internally flowing link equity.

Yes you are perfectly right.  Any visitor will expect to land on a corresponding page, so they get what they want, there is trust and they don't jump of the site.  I would have thought having information on the page relating to the domain change puts people at rest.

[CommT]

Thank you Mick.