301 Redirect to another website

Question

I have a website that ranks highly on Google for a particular page.

For example:

http://www.domain.com/products/product-name

We have built a new website at its own domain, for example:

http://www.product-name.co.uk

That makes the current website defunct.

However the new website is doing poorly on SEO at the moment and we don't want to take down the old website as it still attracts business even though the content is out of date.

We have thought about doing a 301 redirect from the old website to the new one so that any traffic picked up on Google will be taken to the new site.

Questions I have are:

• Will this take the old website off Google high rankings if it now redirects?
• Regardless of the first question, will this improve the rating of the new website?
• Is it better to keep the current website URL up and show some content with the option for the user to click through to new website?

Answer 1

If you redirect from the old site, the old site will be unlisted from the search engines; although this won't be immediate.

301 redirects do pass some page rank equity and link equity and therefore a proportion of the old website's value will be transitioned to the new website.

If you don't do this, Google will continue to recognise the original website as the "authority", the 301 redirect will help to define the new website as the authoritative and "official site". I would advise you bite the bullet and take a small hit of traffic in the short term to help your new websites rankings in the long term, any traffic trying to visit the old website will be redirected anyway.