I am considering juggling some domains for the Sheepstealer brand to accommodate a new site Sheepstealers

I am thinking of moving the clothing shop to Blacknight.ie - search the web and mapping the existing sheepstealers.ie to Sheepstealers
However sheepstealers.ie does very well in SEO so if I do move what is the best way to do that without jeopardising that. If I do a 303 redirect how long should I have that in place before I start using sheepstealers.ie for the new site and content?

Perhaps am I better of just using a subdomain such as network.sheepstealers.ie for the network however I would prefer a cleaner domain name.

Any recommendations?

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Nice site. If you can map the content page for page, you could always set up a 301 redirect which just changes the URL domain but leaves the directory intact. I had the same problem with a site before and this worked fine for me.

PS - I would leave the redirect there until all your pages are indexed... do a site: search on Google.

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Alan

I'd do it in stages rather than all at once.

Using 301 / 302 redirects depending on what you want to do.

Michele

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I agree with Michele, if you've a lot of content, do it in stages, just to make sure Google is picking it up nicely and do a 301!

Here's what Matt Cutt's recommends in a recent talk ... Page 4 - Matt Cutts Gives Talk on White Hat SEO

Personally, I did it with the main 2bscene.net domain name, which now redirects to 2bscene.ie - I lost my rankings, lost my lovely PR7 and am only starting to get back up the rankings after about 6-7 months.

So whatever you do, all i'll say is, don't expect it to be an easy ride!

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I'll chime in with my views also. Agreeing with everything said above. You should expect some downtime however if you move across. You can do it in stages, but if you do it in one go the trick is to get some decent new links pointing at both the old URLs (for googlebot to follow the 301's) and to the new URL (to help get the thing indexed thoroughly). Also leave up an XML sitemap with your OLD urls - that way Google should pick up the 301's. I'm testing this at the minute and generally they aren't too bad at picking up the new content and replacing the old. One or two pages causing problems though G caching an old page with a cache date of July 29 even though it was removed on July 21).

As Tom mentioned, be ready for a wait (although I think Tom may have been very unlucky with his wait time).

Oh, one last thing - map the 301 on a page-to-page basis. Don't just redirect everything to the root of the new site. And try not to change the textual content too much if possible.

There's my €0.02

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If you use mod_rewrite properly then it's a non-issue

You can easily move:
domain1.tld/file1.ext > domain2.tld/file1.ext

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What would be the easiest to change

• www.oldomain.com/sub1/page2.php <--> www.newdomain.net/sub1/page2.php
• www.oldomain.com/sub4/page12.php <--> www.newdomain/sub4/page12.php
• www.oldomain.com/sub2/page2221.php <--> www.newomain.net/sub2/page221.php
• www.oldomain.com/sub66/sub22/page1.php <--> www.newdomain.net/sub66/sub33/page1.php

With a 301 redirect ? Can this be done in a few lines ?

just looking at things I think it should be on www.oldomain.com/.htaccess
taken from here. Not that I am looking to move home or anything ...

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If only life were so easy... sure you'd have no need for support any more in BK

It is a straight forward change in your htaccess file, here's an example of what I used....

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?2bscene\.net$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.2bscene.ie/$1 [R=301,L]

I've seen the 301 redirect work perfectly for other sites, especially if it's on the same domain.

But on 3 occassions where I've changed a .com/.net to a .ie it has taken months to actually work. Jury is still out for me whether this is just coincidence or pure bad luck....

I would like to think it's the latter, but 3 tries, 3 fails is quite frightening!

The reasons I would suggest doing it in stages are nothing technical really. It would merely be to make sure you don't lose too traffic over that period of transition.

I had a proper look at the sheepstealers.ie site and to be honest, I don't think you need to do any fancy tricks. You've 60 pages indexed by google and the majority of them have a PR value assigned to them.

I reckon a simple 301 redirect like the one I showed above will be enough to have you up and running on the new domain in a matter of a few months.

Just make sure you update any links that link to old domain to new asap. Because once you put the new site there and remove the 301 redirect, you will loose all those backlinks!