Hi everyone, I have a little dilemma and wondered if you guys at the forums could give me some advice.
I finished my first website around a year ago and all tough I did some newbie mistakes constructing it the website has functioned reasonable well this far. It is a community based website and the thing is that i did not expect to many members so i could manually construct a profile page for each member. The problem is that the demand for a profile page was more then anticipated and it is very time consuming for me to manually create profile page for each member.
So my thought is to create a new website with wp and buddypress so everyone can play with their on profile page, since my newbie misstakes are still kind of holding my website back. My dilemma is how to incorporate the changes without loosing all the traffic and SEO work I have done on my original website and URL.
All advice is appreciated, thanks.
John
The best thing to do is probably to build it on a ‘hidden’ URL - ie, one that search engines are blocked from, maybe even password protected - to avoid people stumbling across it before it’s ready. Then once it’s done and you’re happy with it, move it into position as the main site. Try to keep URLs for each page the same as before, but if you have to change them, make sure you put a ‘301’ redirect on so that people hitting the old URL get magically taken to the right new page.
If you relaunch the site on the existing domain/URL, you’ve got a much higher chance of keeping most of your visitors and your search rankings and reputation. If you change the URL, you’re likely to lose some of your regulars, as well as having to start from scratch with Google and co.
Sorry for my late answer however thanks Stevie for the advice.
I didn’t want to create a new thread on a follow up question so i decided to post it here. So after doing some research I think the best option is to completely start from scratch with a new domain and website since I did too many beginner mistakes on the foundation for the first one.
So my question is can I do a 301 redirect on the whole original site what would be the best way to use the original site to help the new launched site?
If i buy new domain name is .org and .net less valued by the search engines?
Thanks for all the help!
Cheers,
John
Ideally, you should individually redirect each page on the old sit to a relevant page on the new site.
If i buy new domain name is .org and .net less valued by the search engines?
Nope, search engines couldn’t give a wet slap what TLD you use on your domain. They care about high quality, popular sites - and whether you’ve got a .net or .com address doesn’t matter one way or the other. The only caveat I’d add is that you shouldn’t get a country-specific TLD (eg .co.uk) unless your work is mainly in that country.
I see… so I guess the only issue would be that people are used to write .com after the domain name. In terms of SEO what would you recommend for domain name. keywordkeyword or just a short 4 letter abbreviation… So basically what i am asking is how much does having a keyword in the domain name really help you. Another question that does come up is if i should host the new website with the same hosting account as the first one or if it has any negative implications?
Thanks for all the help Stevie D!!
Cheers,
John