Hi,
I have recently joined this forum as was impressed by many of the responses I've read to other queries and threads & was wondering if you could help.

We recently launched our new product and site however as we're using a modx CMS and previously had a holding site under this domain it appears to be impossible to use the domain name without having it as a redirect; from the original domain to a domain.name/ie.

However I know for a fact that for SEO redirects should be avoided at all costs.. how bad do you think this is? Has anyone had the same problem & still managed to achieve top seo rankings?

Thanks,

loconor
CustomerMinds.com

we are having our identity and company name changed at the moment

we want all our existing traffic that goes to Big Bad Wolf - 3d Visualization - 3d models - Communication (web design, corporate presentations, graphic design, branding) - Illustration - Animation to go to ION

we also have the recently registerd 3Deurope.org point at the ION

does redirecting traffic from an existing longterm url - bigbadwolf differ from the newly register 3Deurope.

Or is it best not to redirect them at all and leave ion.ie on its own?

Any help would be great as we want to get our SEO right as we have had our fill of adwords to increase ranking

thanks in advance.

Redirects if done correctly should not effect your SERPS, i.e. if you use a 301 redirect code it tells the search engines that your pages are permanently moved.
Doing the redirects properly will help you get the new site indexed properly.

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In my recent experience redirecting a 3 year old website it took about a week for Google to index and list the new domain. A week or two after the new domain was indexed and the two domains existed in the serps about a page or half page from each other with the older domain ranked higher. Eventually the newer one climbed and the older one dropped, although I think it's still listed. Overall I was very happy with how redirecting the website turned out and wouldn't say it is bad thing to do. Obviously you don't want to do it for the sake of it but if you need to do it for identity reasons don't worry about it too much, just make sure to use 301 redirects as Paul said. You should also consider updating any links pointing to the old domain too as well as the redirect, it might help boost the new domain quicker.

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MGS Web Design - Web Design Kildare, Web Design Ireland