Transferring PR to new url

[hinote]

Hi,
I have an old site with reasonable ranking, but the domain name is unsuitable.
I have registered a more suitable name.

Is it possible to transfer the PR of the old site to the new site.?

I have considered the following :
- putting a redirect on the old pages.
- updating the domain name registration record to point to new server.

[luisbetancourt]

If you use 301 redirect (Permanent redirect), the PR of your old pages will be transfered to the new ones :)

[seomike]

Both will help. The main thing is getting directory listings or link partner to update the links to the new site. I would do it fast also. The next pagerank update is going to be late July or early August. But there is a month buffer. Meaning if you don't do it now in the next week or so you won't see a PR update until 5 - 6 months out. Not that PR means an entire lot but it's hell trying to get links without it.

[hinote]

thanks Luis.
Just to be clear....
Do this (301 redirect) mean I can totally remove the old site and put the redirect in the contol panel of the server.?
Or....
Do I leave the old homepage in place and redirect from that.?

[luisbetancourt]

and redirect from that.... :)

[mcanerin]

As luisbetancourt implied, to do a 301 properly you need 2 accounts/pages/etc.

Parking only requires one, but getting credit for all your backlinks can take months, and some engines still don't handle it very well.

There is a time and place for parking, but not when you are talking about link pop being passed in an SEO environment - best practice there is a 301.

Ian

[hinote]

Hi, most informative.....
Can you give me an example of the code for 301 Redirect and where it should be placed in the html code.
The code will be in the homepage of site A and Redirecting to site B.

Secondly, does the content / tags of Site A continue to get indexed by G, with the redirect.?

[Robert_Charlton]

Can you give me an example of the code for 301 Redirect and where it should be placed in the html code.
The code will be in the homepage of site A and Redirecting to site B.


hinote - It sounds like you're thinking that a 301 redirect works like a meta refresh redirect... ie, that it's code on the page that redirects the user from one page to another.

301 redirects, though, work on the server, not in the page code, and effectively site A, along with domain A, will cease to exist. So there won't be any site A page code.

Once redirected by the server, spiders and visitors will go transparently to site B, which will replace site A.

The server code depends on what kind of server you have, and what kind of access you have to your server. If you're hosted on an Apache server, you can use either mod_rewrite or the PermanentRedirect command in a server file called .htaccess.

I'm not the person to be advising you on how to implement this on your server. Note that it is possible to crash a server if you don't do this right.

[hinote]

Thank you Robert.
I was not sure from the previous posts how the redirect differed from the meta refresh.
Thanks for clarifying.