Changing Domains - Keep Google Juice

June 3, 2005 11:55 AM

I need to shift one of my websites to a new domain - with the minimal amount of interruption to my Google juice. What is the best way to redirect traffic to the new site? .htaccess redirects? Something else? Other pointers?
posted by ao4047 to computers & internet (3 comments total)

I wrote a post on how to do this right here.
posted by LukeyBoy at 1:16 PM on June 3, 2005

Yeah, Google juice follows HTTP redirects, so follow lukeyboy's instructions. You could also use a PHP script (etc) to do the redirecting.
posted by cillit bang at 1:34 PM on June 3, 2005

When switching domain names, no matter the mechanism you use to implement the redirects, make sure that requests for pages to your old domain return a status of 301 Permanently Moved, not 302 Temporarily Moved. This is particularly useful for search engines like Google, which will carry over page rank to the new page if it sees the 301 status code. In addition, since 301 indicates that the new URL is the prefered URL, Google will eventually update its database to use the new URLs in place of the old URLs if it sees 301 status codes.
posted by RichardP at 6:40 PM on June 3, 2005