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Hi Shop-Sq, This is a tricky one to answer definitively without knowing the details of the two sites. Having been through a very similar situation, I expect that, unless the content is truly identical, you're existing site shouldn't suffer any losses by having both live and indexed at once. That said, until you properly redirect the old pages to their new counterparts, the new site will probably only see marginal growth. So running them side-by-side, you're not likely to get a good measure of how the new site will perform once you redirect. In my experience, there's no way to handle a site-wide redirect like this "risk-free" with a smooth transition. But you'd have a chance to catch any technical issues that might negatively impact Google's ability to crawl/index the new site's content if you launch it well ahead of March, then set the redirects once you're comfortable (again I'd want to do this well ahead of busy season if possible). This will give Google some time to crawl the redirects, pass PageRank to the new site - and it'll give you and your team some time to work out any kinks. Hope this helps at least somewhat - these are not easy situations to evaluate especially without detailed knowledge of both sites. Best of Luck, Mike

Thank you so much I really appreciate the response.

Thank you very much, I greatly appreciate the response. Any other feedback from is welcome. Thank you!

What if you take two existing sites, and merge them into the same magento install for example.  But do what you suggest and have both sites run different product names, descriptions etc.  So from the front end the user would know no different, but searching records you would see the two sites run on the same server, under the same install of magento?

Thank you very much. I guess I just need to add in our email and I can safely say that we are good.

Thank you, I appreciate the answer

Jeff is completely right on this one!

Hi guys thanks for the replies. Its kind of a weird situation because although both sites are for the same company and product they serve / served different purposes. The word press site basically just presented some content and gave a broad stroke over view of what we do. The Magento site is set up to actually present the content, allow users to log in and download premium content... As a downloadable product. The word press site never went as deep into it and did not have individual product pages or user log ins and downloads. The sites are laid out in 2 entirely different ways, so its not so easy to just match product pages to product pages and category pages to category pages. They have 2 totally different ways of presenting content. The sites are 2 different domains. The word press site did have a blog filled with very mediocre content that I have no desire to bring to the new site. Im fine with it completely disappearing.. All of the above is what lead me to believe the best approach might be just to snag whatever juice possible out of the old site. thanks for any further replies.