Should I Kill the Old Domain or Work Through the Redirect?

[Eagle-ABS]

Our IT department wasn't able to create a new directory on the current domain name for whatever reason and so we had to create a new domain name called ww2.domain.com to build the new site.  So now we have the new site up and appartly some PDFs and pages are being directed to the from the old site.  www.domain.com but 10,000 pages /PDFs are still indexed in Google and are not redirected.  So when you open the page you get the old www.domain.com instead of it redirecting to ww2.domain.com.  It's sort of a mess!  My question is can we just kill the old domain name and move the ww2.domain.com back to the old domain?  We also want to do away with the ww2.domain.com and go back to www.domain.com.  I know it's confusing as heck!

What would you recommend?

[max.favilli]

I am not sure I fully understand, but when you publish a new website you must secure all old urls have a match in the new website, otherwise is bad, very bad.

The second problem is that since you publish something somewhere it get indexed and once it's indexed if it disappear is bad.

The good news is to generate 10k redirect is not a big issue.

The basic principle is urls should never disappear, they should always exist, maybe redirect, but never disappear.

[Toddfoster]

Hello Darren,

I'm not sure if I understand the question but I will try to answer based on what I think you mean.

From what I understand, you have 301 redirected the old domain to the new domain but not many pages (the 10,000 you mentioned). You can, of course, 301 redirect (re-redirect, as it were) the ww2. domain to the old www. as long as you are willing to risk a small loss in "link juice" which normally results from such an action.

You can also kill the old domain name and re-institute the new domain name over it in www. format - I'm not sure why your IT department didn't do this in the first place to save you a lot of hassle, although they should have known if redirecting 10,000 files was going to be an arduous task for them.

Alternatively, you can just cancel the original 301 redirect and resume with the original domain name while erasing the new version - this might not solve your "directory" issue, but it would help to clean the situation up. I would focus on addressing the root cause of the issue rather than attempting to meddle around with the technical SEO aspects of your website - you only want to be making adjustments that help your marketing efforts.

As a last resort, you could also bring in a consulting firm to address the original issue. If your IT department isn't up to the task, there is no shame is getting help from experts in the field.

Hope this helps!

Rob

[Eagle-ABS]

Thanks guys for the input.  I am thinking then about killing the one domain www and then re-institute the name www over the ww2. That sounds like the best oprion for what this situation is.  The ww2 has about 600 pages indexed (which is the new website) and the www (which is the old site) has 10k pages indexed but at this point just to clean it up, then this sounds like a good way to go.  Also the directory structure is not the same.  Lead gen unfortunately is not part of the digital strategy so I guess losing link juice may not be as important.  Eventually the new site pages/pdfs will be ineeded.

thanks for the feedback. Just wanted to reconfirm my thinking.

[max.favilli]

In other words they/you don't care about traffic, so what's the point of having a website?