Old domain has PR4 - New domain has PR 0 - How to play this one?

[Dan Morgan]

Hi All,

Firstly this is not a "why is my PR 0 question".

I used to have a site, www.starski.com which managed to get to PR4 thanks to Chris and those at SPF. We lost our supplier so mid/late last year the site ceased trading, and was dormant ever since (did not take it down - host stopped support and was 500'ing all the time).

About 2 weeks ago I decided to create a content site based on the same subject, and www.ski-review.com was born. I have some good backlinks (soon to kick in) and have had great luck with DMOZ/Zeal and our friend GoogleBot.

I pointed the starski.com domain to it and it has been sending it about half the traffic the site currently receives.
Recently I have seen google listing the starski domain with the new title info in the SERPs (ahead of ski-review on the 64 datacentre)

Question number 1. If you check starski.com has a PR of 4 STILL even though it has been inaccessible for months? Should that be the case? (Many of the backlinks still exist but not the more fruitful ones).

Secondly, what is the most effective way of using starski.com with the site?

Eventually starski will cease but for the time being what should I do, it is currently supplying a lot of traffic although I cannot tell whether this is from SE or direct traffic. What are the current vibes surrounding dual domains?

Ultimately I want just one domain name for aestethics, my own anal personality and not to confuse the users (already seen someone referencing starski.com as a source for a review for a pair of skis being sold on ebay...).

Thanks all. Any advice heartily received.

Dan

[Percept]

If I understood the question correct, you should tell Google the site ( page ) has been moved permanently to another place. You can do this by putting an .htaccess file in the root directory of starski.com with the following lines:

redirect 301 /index.html http://www.ski-review.com/index.html
redirect permanent /index.html http://www.ski-review.com/index.html
redirectpermanent /index.html http://www.ski-review.com/index.html

This way, the PR of starski.com should get p***ed on to ski-review.com


To avoid confusion for old-time-visitors, I would put a little ( but noticable ) message on your new site telling people starski has changed names to Ski-review.


I hope that helps.

[Dan Morgan]

Thanks Percept!

However, both domains are hosted on the same account, with www.starski.com as an additional domain.

Could I do what you suggested with modifications (see below). And more importantly, would this method be a temporary one or would it need to be permanent?

Would I need index.html (or php in this case) or is as below the same?

redirect 301 http://www.starski.com/ http://www.ski-review.com/
redirect permanent http://www.starski.com/ http://www.ski-review.com/
redirectpermanent http://www.starski.com/ http://www.ski-review.com/

[Percept]

I don't see why your method shouldn't work just as good ( but I'm no expert on this myself so it would be nice to see someone else confirm it )

The method tell's Google or any other SE that the page has moved permanently so after the next google crawl and update ski-review should have a PR 4 nomatter what you do with the starski domain after that.

[Dan Morgan]

Thanks again, thats interesting. So basically if you have a domain with a given PR, you can basically transplant the PR to another one whenever you want?

Would the backlinks to starski.com have to remain in place even if I totally dump the starski.com domain?

[Percept]

I forgot to add that you should ask the people who are currently linking to starski.com to alter their links otherwise you will lose some PR.

[Dan Morgan]

Okeydokey!

I added that to my .htaccess file but notice that when typing in starski, it does not change the url in the address bar to ski-review.

I would have thought that in addition to giving SE's the nod, it would take place when normal users visited as well?

[Percept]

That's strange, I've been searching some more on google about this and I'm getting several different things on wether what to put in the .htaccess . It might be better to remove those lines fornow till we are sure they are 100% correct.

This is another line I've found:

Redirect 301 index.php http://yourdomain.com/index.php

[Dan Morgan]

Ok thanks for all your help. Maybe someone can shed some light on this.

Regards
Dan

[Dan Morgan]

Anyone? ;)

[LaughBlaster]

Originally posted by Dan Morgan
Anyone? ;)

Redirect permanent http://www.starski.com http://www.ski-review.com

Note the Capitalized R

I've used this many times, it works fine, and passes the PR on to the new domain so the old domain can gracefully drop off.

This also won't work on windows based servers, only *nix based machines.

[Dan Morgan]

Gotcha, thanks uploaded new .htaccess.

Server is a *nix, but www.starski.com is still showing in the address bar.

Anything I can do to check its working?

Also, any possibility to use wildcard so all starski.com/anything urls are passed to ski-review root.

[Dan Morgan]

Just thought that maybe the fact that both domains are on the same host account might be something to do with it?

If they werent, then:

Redirect permanent / http://www.ski-review.com

Would be the option. Does it work in the case where both domains are on the same server. Can Apache pull out both names?

The host uses H-Sphere if it makes any difference?

[LaughBlaster]

It does make it harder since both domains have the same root directory, now if you had starski.com parked on a subdirectory then the .htaccess above would work fine. But with both domains using the same directory it makes a single .htaccess file difficult if not impossible.

I use this site to check status codes :)
http://www.wannabrowser.com/index.html

[LaughBlaster]

Incidentaly, since you are using mambo your index file is index.php?

You can use

Redirect permanent /index.html http://www.ski-review.com/index.php


<edit> That is about the easiest way to get the address rewritten and to get the 301 response code to the crawlers. But that will also redirect any http://www.ski-review.com/ requests to ski-review.com/index.php ;)

It won't effect http://www.ski-review.com/somefilename.php just anyone typing or clicking on links for http://www.ski-review.com/ will be redirected to the index.php file.

This works because apache looks for the index.html as a default first, then looks for other index files (index.htm, default.html, default.htm, index.cgi, index.php etc. etc.) So the .htaccess works and sends you to the index.php file before the whole index list is gone through.

[Dan Morgan]

That would not work on my setup so thanks to Pippo over @ SPF I now have the following:



# starski.com/anything www.starski.com/anything anything.starski.com/anything
# every.sub.domain.starski.com/anything
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.*)starski\.com$ [NC]
# will be redirected to www.ski-review.com/anything
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.ski-review.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]


Which redirects any starski to ski-review and shows ski-review in the browser.

Will there be any SE penalty doing it this way and will the SE's pick up the redirection when spidering a www.starski.com link specifically the starski.com/ one which still appears in the SERPS.

TIA,

Dan

[rocky1]

Having gone through the same routine Dan, it's going to take awhile for the bots to change their tune. Took mine almost 2 months before they finally dropped listing on the old site.

[Dan Morgan]

Yeah I figured as much. Would just be nice if there was a clear cut way in which to utilize the old domains PR, traffic (and its getting a lot of type ins so branding) with the new site without confusing people.

Currently it achieves most of the above, but it would be nice to know if the Mod Rewrite method will funnel the PR mentioned in the beginning of this thread.

[Percept]

Dan, I think it will tunnel the PR as long as the starsky domain is active ( and redirecting ). You should try to find as many backlinks to your starsky site and if possible ask the people to change the link to your new domain. You won't be able to find all people linking to you since Google only shows backlinks from pages who have at least a PR 4 themselfs.

[Dan Morgan]

Yeah I have been on the back link issue for a while but its slow progress. In fact the only ones now listed (PR4 and above as you said) are ones form my SP author bio which has been updated so I should not show and backlinks after the next dance.

Re the below, you are referring to redirecting being the Mod Rewrite external redirect, as the standard 301 would not work. Is there a difference in PR funnelling depending on which redirect I use?

Thanks

Dan



Dan, I think it will tunnel the PR as long as the starsky domain is active ( and redirecting ).