So I’ve got a client with pretty good rankings at blablabla.com
They’ve decided to change the company name "Great Bla" and have just bought (in a private sale) greatbla.com. For 3 years that site had read "under construction" and now they want the content at the older blablabla.com site on there.
I’m thinking that what I want is called "domain masking"?? where if someone types in greatbla.com then it shows them the content of blablabla.com but the address bar still reads greatbla.com
Is that what I want? is that the best way to do this? How would I do this?
(thanking Nick ahead of time 😉
12 Responses
Are there any disadvantages to doing a 301 from blablabla.com to greatbla.com?
I’m not betting that 100% will be passed, and without hitch….and it ranks high eneough that I’m afraid to test this.
Also, they’d like it if people who say “heard of them” typed in GreatBla.com and to see that URL in the address Bar…yet have Google 100% show from the old url.
I’m 90% confident that you can do a 301 from the old higher ranking domain to the new one, and Google will adjust accordingly, without your SERPs for those keywords/pages lowering. However, this may be a question to throw on Matt Cutt’s blog. He’s pretty good at answering questions like that if he’s not too busy.
If it were me, I would simply do the 301, where it keeps the exact link and content, but switches out the domain with the new one.
The 301 will work fine. I only doubt with one thing, domain age, but i think 301 should redirect popularity and other values for SE algorythm
I agree that 301 redirect is good idea, but that about the Sandbox?
As far as I know the new domain will get sandboxes (at least according to my experience it happened 2 or 3 times when I tried out this way).
Is there a way to avoid Sandbox while transferring a website?
domain forwarding with url masking will do good.
I did a 301 from high ranking olddomain.com to newdomain.com last June and the site didn’t crawl out of the sandbox until November.
There was a big thread on WMW about 301 redirects and the sandbox late last year. Many people reporting having a similar experience.
Yea, I’m not a fan of doing the 301 on an existing website that currently ranks well. I’ve heard too many problems with time delays. Who trusts a 301 to seamlessly flow?
Sorry Jim – the wife dragged me away from work for a while 🙂
Yes domain masking would work (as Murugan writes) but that’s more a solution tailored to the visitor than the search engines IMO. You would then have to put a robots.txt on the blablabla.com site to avoid the duplicate filter knocking the new greatbla.com out of the index (presuming the latter has less link popularity etc. but if it’s one of your famous golden oldies Jim this could get very interesting!).
I have a gut feeling though that a hand-brake stop like that would not be great in regard to the sandbox.
I actually got pointed to an article Scottie wrote on this and I’ve been waiting to try it out myself. She suggests initially using a 302 and then moving over to a 301 at the final stage.
http://www.highrankings.com/issue142.htm#guest
I’d love to know how that went though 😉
Thanks everyone – esp Nick!
Nick, thanks for sharing your knowledge freely here!
No problem Jim – I know you’re happy to do the same.
Hi there
Im the client, I just wanted to thank Jim and everyone that replied to this problem, you were a great help and Im going to print that article posted by Nick now and sort this out!
Cheers
Sarah
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