Changing domains - best process to use?

[Gavin.Atkinson]

I am about to move my Thailand-focused travel website into a new, broader Asia-focused travel website. The Thailand site has had a sad history with Google (algorithmic, not penalties) so I don't want that history to carry over into the new site. At the same time though, I want to capture the traffic that Google is sending me right now and I would like my search positions on Bing and Yahoo to carry through if possible.

Is there a way to make all that happen?

At the moment I have migrated all the posts over to the new domain but I have it blocked to search engines. I am about to start redirecting post for post using meta-refresh redirects with a no-follow for safety. But at the point where I open the new site up to indexing, should I at the same time block the old site from being indexed to prevent duplicate content penalties?

Also, is there a method I can use to selectively 301 redirect posts only if the referrer is Bing or Yahoo, but not Google, before the meta-refresh fires? Or alternatively, a way to meta-refresh redirect if the referrer is Google but 301 redirect otherwise? Or is there a way to "noindex, nofollow" the redirect only if the referrer is Google? Is there a danger of being penalised for doing any of these things?

Late Edit: It occurs to me that if my penalties are algorithmic (e.g. due to bad backlinks), does 301 redirection even carry that issue through to the new website? Or is it left behind on the old site?

[Gavin.Atkinson]

Well I don't know if anyone is interested, but I thought I'd share the outcome of my site relaunch with the new domain name and expanded content coverage.

Back when I started the process, I was responding to what seemed to be an EMD penalty from Google for my domain "traveltipsthailand.com". Traffic had dropped from a peak above 500 sessions per day in July 2013 to way less than 100 sessions per day by December 2013 when I made the decision to act.

I registered a new domain "www.travelnasia.com" and redesigned the site using my master branding "Asian Travel Tips", expanding the coverage from a focus on Thailand to include China, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia (which I also enjoy travelling to). I went through every single post in the site and looked hard at what to keep and what to rewrite, restructured the content and the permalinks and re-launched on 22 December 2013.

Visitors bumbled along for quite a while at less than 100 sessions per day, with my site struggling to get a ranking in Google above #500 even for long-tail key phrases. At this stage I stupidly still had my old domain 301 redirecting URLs to the new domain. I stopped that in ear;y January and turned the old domain off - copping a drop of 50% in the already low visitor traffic.

Using Moz Pro, I've been analysing the site every week since then, tweaking and adding new content. I noticed that my images were the first content to get ranking back on Google, quickly getting up into the top #100 and even some into the top #10. This was promising, so I went back into my posts and started adding lots more images in the body content (I had tended to rely on image slider galleries up till then).

Over the past 7-8 months I've been able to see my Google rankings climbing to the point where content pages started ranking in the top #10, even on some competitive key phrases. I now have 20 key phrases ranking top #3, 51 more in the top #10, 70 more in the top #50 and 240 more outside top #50. Since early September I've started to see this reflected in Google search impressions and organic search traffic, with visitors from Google jumping from just over 200 a week to almost 800 a week in November 2014.

Overall, site visitors are now up to 3500 unique per month in November 2014 and up almost 50% from October. Nowhere near the "glory days" of July 2013, but I guess you can argue that I might have been basking in the glow of EMD advantage at that time and it would never have lasted.

So was it worth it? Yes, absolutely. It forced me to change the focus of the site, it forced me to work hard on my social media profiles, it forced me to review all the content and start adding more content. It forced me to rebuild my audience and be more thoughtful about it.