I know that the 301 issue has been beaten to death many times, but I face an issue which requires a little closer consideration.

For reasons not relevant here, I have to exit a top ranking domain name. Yes, a significant blow. The question I face is how to buy time? How can I keep hold of my #1 Placement, or close to it, for the next 3 months or so?

I do keep control of BOTH domain for this period, but have to shift my content pretty much immediately, and replace it with a page stating broadly that we have moved.

At this point my options appear to be:


1) A Meta Refresh
I could stick a 5 second meta-refresh on the original, but I would actually prefer a 0 second one. Would the latter attract a penalty?

Has anyone any experience of this? I doubt a 5 second refresh would attract one, but what about 0 seconds?

The idea is that Google would crawl the original, and it would remain there or thereabouts because the right sort of keywords are still on the page pre-refreshed (I assume Google still crawls the original page even for a refresh of 0).


2) A 301 Re-Direct
It looks as though the issues surrounding this just havn't been fixed, and that a 301 would blow both the new and old sites out of the water for at least a few months.

Is this still the current state of play?


3) A 302 Temp Re-Direct
I wonder how this would work. I sense that the implications might be similar to a 301, and it might blow me away.


As I stated above, I just want broad placement for one or the other of the two sites to stay more or less in tact for a couple of months, whilst I can find other solutions. The above 3 spring to mind as potentials, but any other ideas would certainly be welcome too.

I'm not sure why you feel anything has changed, Morpheus9. I believe a straight-forward 301 Permanent Redirect should do the trick for you.

I'm not sure why you feel anything has changed, Morpheus9. I believe a straight-forward 301 Permanent Redirect should do the trick for you.Because everytime I have used a 301, both sites involved have been dumped by Google. There are threads all over the net about the dire consequnces of a 301 ref Google.

Now unless something has changed... I really don't want to zap my own sites. Hence this thread. Has anything changed? How have other people tackled issues like the one described above? What about the zero-second meta-refresh (a penalty?)?

This must be a common scenario, but I cannot find anyone who has suceeded in rthe mission described.