Moving Site to New Domain

[AycheKay]

We are planning to move our website to a new domain. Not only are we moving the site, we are also redesigning the entire site. Both sites are programmed in ASP classic (yeah, I know).

Currently we have one single, dynamic page which handles all of our equipment searching/equipment listings. It's very important for us to maintain the rankings we have in Google for the many variations of this dynamic page, as well as the rest of our site.

Instead of one equipment search page, we're now going to have different pages (with different page names) for the different types or categories of equipment that we handle. This will allow us to present different filters and different columns for the different types of equipment. Because of this change, our old equipment page needs to somehow map to the new pages in such a way that our visitors and Google don't get confused.

What type of redirects do I need to use? Any tips on how to move our site to a new domain without losing our Google ranking?

[JorgeM]

If your new site was moving to asp.net, this is very easy to handle using the URL Rewrite module. It does take some time to learn URL rewriting, but when it "clicks" its very easy to use and very powerful for redirects and rewrites. I use it on my site. I moved from a blogsite to a dedicated web and leverage URL rewriting so I didnt loose my page ranks for established articles.

You can still do this in ASP, but I beleive that you'll need to handle this in the asp code. Not sure about that, maybe someone else can provide insight on how to do this with asp.

I assume that the dynamic page your have is using a querystring in the URL? To maintain page rank, you'll want to redirect to the new pages. The redirect should be a permanent redirect so that the web spiders can update the search engine DB. It may take a few months to have all of your links updated. Be patient, it will work once you have the redirects in place. It helps if you have an account created on Google Webmaster Central so that you can submit your old and new site, verify them, submit a new sitemap, and watch the progress of your redirects...

Do as much homework as possible before you cut over so when you do create the new links and redirects, you only do this once.

Here is a high level summary with some of the things to consider to making your site more SEO friendly now that you are considering to move... http://www.itgeared.com/articles/1225-how-to-make-your-website-seo-friendly/

[AycheKay]

Thanks for your input. I also found this article which is helpful although I don't know if there's anything fairly important omitted or not.

When it comes to the redirects, I have already used this code (ASP Classic) on other projects.

    Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
    Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.MyNewURLGoesHere.com"
    Response.End

[AycheKay]

Guess I forgot to post my link to the article I found:
http://www.stemlegal.com/strategyblog/2011/tips-for-moving-domain-names/

[JorgeM]

So, yes...using asp code, fortunately, you only have one page where you would need to use this. However, since the one page is dynamic, your asp code is going to have to accomodate the different variables that are submitted to the dynamic page. I mentioned that I had assumed that you are using a querystring for this dynamic page? In other words, to access this page, you have a ?parmname=stringvalue appended to the URL? If so, then on your new site, you need to have a page with the same name as the old, then in ASP code, create the redirects based on the parameters that are passed to this site. If you do not use querystring, but post, then the idea is the same, but the manner in which you access the parameters passed to this page are different. Your goal with this asp page is just to create redirets to the new page. If you have backlinks established on the internet for this old asp page, you will need to leave it in place indefinately to ensure that users that click on old links get redirected to the new page.