Experience of moving to a new domain

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi all

just wondering if anyone has ever had any experience / tips / advice.

moving from domain name a to b is well published all over the web and the practice is often discussed on here.

but my question is has anyone ever done moving the domain from a to b and then after x time move back to domain a.

i can't find any examples, notes anywhere on Google.

thanks in advance

[DanielMulderNL]

Yes I have recently done something similar 2 times. One time for a local company which had a SEO targeting an geographically unsuitable service area for my client. It is a traffic school operating in a large city situated next to an even larger city. The SEO took a new domein xxxcity.nl and focused the keyword strategy on this as well. But how do the instructors pickup and drop off students in city A north and city B south within a hour or 90 minutes. Never going to happen 8 times a day on time. And it doesnt convert well either because people now this when the see an offer.

But I undid the city in the url part by copying the website enterely and placed a simple php script in the WordPress index.php file in the root. This replaces the domain for all request and redirects with a 301. The destination domain is the domain the client previously used.

// Permanent redirect of all PR from A > B

// Get http request headers for requests on old page
  $uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

// Get the path after the old domain to redirect to corresponding page on new
  $url_path = parse_url($uri, PHP_URL_PATH);

// drop the city from the url and go to new location
  $location_new = 'http://www.xxxrijschool.nl' . $url_path;

// send 301 and load destination url
  header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
  header("Location: $location_new");

exit();
?>

The above script I place on the old domain A but only after copying the whole website to the new domain B. If it's a 1-on-1 copy then this script is places on A. Thats all. It will cost some PageRank to move 2 times for 1 page but the transfer starts in a few days and will be noticeable in 2 weeks or so. After 6-8 weeks it will mostly be moved and normalize from there on. If in between we optimize on-page and aquire good backlinks then it will turn the decline of rank and can outperform the old site in a matter of 8 weeks.

For larger and large site it's recommended that the time to live for DNS records is set to 5 minutes at least a week in advanced, This is recommended by google somewhere in the guide for transfering domains in webmaster tools I believe.

Hope this helps/

Gr Daniel