Website 301's - Question about domain moving strategy

[drivin_me_nuts]

Hopefully one of you knowledgable bods will be able to help me out with a train of thought regarding shifting web domains

I own 4 websites (obviously not their real names, bu you'll get the idea)

www.abc.co.uk
www.abc.com

www.abclonger.co.uk
www.abclonger.com


Now at the moment everyhing points to www.abc.co.uk

At the moment this site has a number of pages - 80+ actually pointing to things like

www.abc.co.uk/depression
www.abc.co.uk/bipolar
www.abc.co.uk/male-rape
www.abc.co.uk/cancer

Now, I want to move domains. I want to move everything that is currently on www.abc.co.uk to www.abclongername.co.uk. I want to then reuse the www.abc.co.uk name for a second website.

AFTER the move, the longer named site will be the 86+ pages, the shorter named site is different and is specifically for my clients with sign in area etc. It has a different brief and is a very select website for those who actually want to commit to work, whereas the first one is the 'free' site for general use with the 80 odd pages on it.

Now the thing is, what's the best way to do this?

Should I move from the shorter name to the longer name, set us a 301 divert, wait for google to rename in the searches everything that is currently www.abc.co.uk/ to www.abclongername.co.uk?

Supposing I did it all together. On big band day I move from the shorter to the longer, put my shorter new site up and then set up a specific divert page so that the 'missing ones' that come up in the google search are automatically transferred to the longer site? For example if someone clicks on www.abc.co.uk/body-image it takes them to www.abclongername.co.uk/body image


I don't want to mess things up and I am mindful that google can get very sniffy with ratings and rankings when pages go missing etc.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what might be a sensible approach to going about this?

Cheers

DMN

[Pigeon]

Can you set things up so there are no pages with the same name on both sites? From your description of what they are for it sounds like that shouldn't be a problem and it might indeed be like that anyway.

In which case you can do a quick'n'dirty... set the short site so that anything at all that 404s turns into a 301 to the long site, and then let the long site either return the page or return a 404.

[lestag]

what is the website server software IIS , apache??? and the website programming code ASP?PHP?

edited to keep speeling police happy

Edited by lestag on Thursday 25th February 01:32

[evenflow]

I don't think you can do this without affecting your rankings. Moving will cause a dip in your natural search rankings. The new domain won't have any of the inbound links of the old domain, and will therefore be considered by google as new. However, with a 301 redirect on the old domain, google will eventually pass some of the "link juice" of the old domain to the new.

Google recommends keeping your old domain for 180 days

I'm not sure that removing the 301 redirect on the old domain before you are satisfied with the pagerank of the new domain is a good idea.

[drivin_me_nuts]

Thanks for your help.

I am just wondering if perhaps the more pragmatic approach is to keep the site names the same and use the .com site for my new site and leave the .co.uk site as my 'old' one.

This site ranking issue is a big deal for me. I have content that is at the top of the world listings for some big keywords and searches and I want it to stay there and I don't want to lose my natural growth which is starting to develop quite nicely.

[evenflow]

drivin_me_nuts said:

Now, I want to move domains. I want to move everything that is currently on www.abc.co.uk to www.abclongername.co.uk. I want to then reuse the www.abc.co.uk name for a second website.

Could you do a 301 redirect on www.abclongername.co.uk to www.abc.co.uk (where the site is already)? In that way, you could promote the www.abclongername.co.uk domain as you saw fit, but people would end up seeing the content on www.abc.co.uk.

For the second website, could you register another domain such as www.a-b-c.co.uk - so something similar but unique?

Edited by evenflow on Thursday 25th February 10:54