301 redirects mirrored domain

Question

I'm redesigning a site for a friend on my localhost. His old site is an .asp based site and we're replacing it with a WordPress site on LAMP hosting. The old site sits on domain A and also has another domain, domain B parked on top of it mirroring it.

Google has picked up domain B for most of his search engine results and yahoo and bing etc have picked up domain A.

The plan is to 301 redirect the the old pages of his site on domain A to the new WordPress versions and park domain B on top of it like before. My question is, will this work, if not what would be a better way to approach it?

We'd prefer not to lose any of the search engine listings in the redesign, and the search engines don't appear to have penalized him for duplicate content.

Thanks very much in advance!

Answer 1

You definitely want to do a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones so both search and users can find the content once it has moved. This will also tell the search engines to count links pointing to the old URLs to the new ones which is very important if you wish to retain whatever rankings you have thus far.

As for parking the second domain on top of the first, that is just a bad idea. Just because the site hasn't suffered for it ye5 doesn't mean it isn't going to happen. How do you think ignoring it is going to feel when the site suddenly disappears from Google's search results? Not to mention it's bad usability as it can be confusing to users to see the same content on different websites. Choose a primary domain and do a 301 redirect from the other domain to it. That way you stop confusing users and avoid potential, and inevitable, duplicate content issues in the future.