Permanent redirect to different domain followed by temporary redirect to folder

Question

I have old-domain.com which I want to migrate to new-domain.com. However, the content on the old domain is, well, old. And I'm currently in the process of redesigning my whole site.

My idea is to do a permanent (301) redirect from old-domain.com to new-domain.com so that search engines know about the new domain and forget about the old one. But since the content is old I was thinking to do a temporary (302) redirect from new-domain.com to new-domain.com/old/ until the new content/site is ready to be published.

Is this, for some reason, a bad idea? Or there's nothing wrong with it?

One last thing... If I go with this, what should I do when the new content is ready? Should I just remove the 302 redirect and that's it, or should I do something else to notify search engines that the temporary redirect is over?

Answer 1

It's probably best to just not redirect old-domain.com until new-domain.com is ready. You can continue to work on new-domain.com and migrate content while old-domain.com is still active. Once it's ready, you can 301 old-domain.com to new-domain.com and even setup redirects for specific pages if necessary to point to the new version on new-domain.com.

If you follow through with the plan you've outlined above, then you'll end up with a mess of incoming traffic to new-domain.com/old/ that was indexed by search engines that you'll have to deal with.