Moving to a new domain without redirects

Hi, I want to move the contents of my site to a new domain but I want to do the entire process step by step over a couple of months so that for a substantial period of time I will have to sites running parallel. Each site will have unique content as I will create new content for the new site while moving pages from the old site to the new site at the same time.

My question is this: Will Google understand that I’m moving the contents of my site to a new domain even if I don’t add any redirects? That is, I will simply remove pages from the old site and add them to the new site. How long will it take until the new pages receive the same amount of traffic as the existing pages?

Many thanks for your answers in advance.

Google will eventually find your content at the new address without redirects. However, anyone who follows an old link or an old bookmark will just get a “not found” error, so you stand to lose traffic unless you redirect each page as you move it.

Search engines will also get a 404 error. While they will discover the content at the new domain, they will have no way of connecting it with the old domain without redirects.

Hi @Openmind. and welcome to the forum.

I am curious to know of your apparent reluctance not to use redirection especially since the web is designed to cater for every eventuality.

I am also curious to know how many current pages are involved and if a content management system is used on either site.

The new site could have a common HTML header with meta tags set at nofollow and noindex only for old pages that have been transferred. After every page has bee transferred, remove the meta tags and apply a 301 redirect from the old site to the new site.

http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html

If the htaccess is set for “pretty URLs” to a common index.php the filtering the old from the new and applying the appropriate meta tags is a simple process.

Edit:
Replaced with a more meaningful link.

Edit:
Changed user name.

Hi John, thanks a lot for your response and your questions. At the current site there are about 30k pages and I’m reluctant to use redirects because the site was hard coded and it might be too difficult to add proper redirects to every single page. As for the new site, it will be built with Python in Django.
PS: I have changed my username to something more meaningful, hope this is OK.

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It really depends on what the URLs look like on both the old and new sites, but it may be possible to “kill many birds with one stone” using regex in your redirects.

In the least, even if you don’t do any redirects
I would consider having a custom Not Found page with something like
“May have been moved to new site” linking to the TOC, Search eg.

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