My site currently has like 4-5 pages, so the front page is a copy letter or business intro, I have an about page, a contact page, and a services page… But I also have a blog with 4-5 posts on it on computer repair tips and tricks
If I want to move everything to the new site, whats the process I have to do?
If I just remake the website with the same content… will I rank badly because its considered duplicate content? What if I do that and 301 the old site (perma redirect) to the new site, without changing the content, will then it still remain original content?
1st get the new domain name.
2nd, hopefully you are hosting on a unix/php site. For the old domain use an include file in the new index.php that points to the new site. All of your old files should be easily hosted on the new site. The old content should be easily imported to the new site. Then it shouldn’t matter what domain name users link to.
If you set up your website at the new URL and then 301 redirect all pages from the old site to the new one (either by a mod_rewrite rule or just manually setting it for each page, which isn’t a huge job if you’ve only got a few pages) then search engines will understand that you have simply moved your website to a new domain name, and will transfer all the rankings and everything from the old URLs to the new ones.
What you don’t want to do is (i) leave the old site ‘live’, because then people will still be going to it, or (ii) close the old site with no redirect, because then anyone who has bookmarked the old site or follows an old link to it will just get an error page.
If you don’t already have a .htaccess file, you’ll need to create one - just a plain text file in Notepad or something similar will do the trick. You might have a bit of difficulty persuading Windows to allow you to create a file that (it thinks) has an extension but no actual name, but there are ways round it.
Then, to do the redirects. The easiest way, if you don’t have a massive number of them, is to just type in a line for each of the pages that you want to redirect. So if you wanted to redirect website.com/oldpage.htm to website.com/newpage.htm, you would type: