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I think i might have slipped up here and would love some advice on this before i start making changes

We have the domains www.mysite.com and www.mysite.co.uk Currently we have the main site on www.mysite.com , this runs a host of subdomains uand redirects for other sites, in asp.net

I develop in php and as such thought it would be easiest to launch a new server and host the new site on www.mysite.co.uk and put a frame forward on the www.mysite.com domain.

This would means no other changes needed, as i wasnt too sure about the DNS settings and certainly wouldnt want to play with the source code and server. This frame forward provided by 123-reg seems to have destroyed all page rankings though, cant find www.mysite.com in any searches

Is there away to get the www.mysite.com ranking back up to the top again?

Thanks for your advice

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  • Google's Webmaster Guidelines say don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects. Wikipedia defines Frame Redirects as cloaking. If you have a "Google Webmaster Tools" account, that may have a "request reconsideration" button (as per How to apply for a Google PageRank reconsideration).
    – odrm
    Commented Apr 14, 2011 at 16:02
  • John's answer is exactly right. You did not say what market you are targeting. If its international the dot com is better. If its local UK traffic (like a service business) the dot UK would be better.
    – Joe
    Commented Apr 14, 2011 at 23:33

1 Answer 1

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Frames are not search engine friendly and frame forwarding is definitely not how you want to do this. As you can see it is not search engine friendly and only hurts you. Plus users can find it confusing because the URL in the address bar never changes. Basically it's a bad idea all the way around.

What you need to do is a proper 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new URLs. That will forward both search engines and users to the new pages and also transfer over any link popularity your current pages have. It also tells search engines to update their indexes with the new pages and to remove the old ones.

To summarize:

  • Get rid of that frame redirect

  • Set up a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new URLs

  • If you have no pages indexed then submit an XML sitemap to Google through their Webmasters Tools

  • Be patient. It isn't going to correct itself overnight.

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  • apologies i missed some valuable data, we still have the www.mysite.com . The problem was i didnt want to lost all the mx records etc associated with it, (theres quite a few). Would this be solved if i just change the A records there?
    – nextyear
    Commented Apr 14, 2011 at 16:52
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    @nextyear, You can keep the domain and the email addresses if you do this properly. I don't know exactly how your server is set up, nor am I server admin per sé, but it shouldn't be difficult to do. I use cPanel and Apache so I would just have both point to the same web root and then use .htaccess to redirect to the new URLs. That way no DNS records need to be changed and email accounts are unaffected.
    – John Conde
    Commented Apr 14, 2011 at 17:43

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