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I have an online store that is already around for 5 years – let's say the web address is oldsite.com. It has about 1,000-2,000 visitor/day, about 18,000 indexed page. But oldsite.com is using a very old script and I hardly upgrade it.

Then about 2 month ago I created a new website, for example newsite.com. It has the same categories (Fashion, Books, Electronics, etc), but different products (the links are not exactly the same as the old ones are). What I want to do is I want to shut down oldsite.com and move the traffic to newsite.com. I can redirect a.com to b.com. But, How can I tell Google to redirect from oldsite.com/fashion to newsite.com/fashion, etc? What is the best practice for my current condition?

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    Domain redirection is easy but traffic redirection will take time. Do not be hurry to shutdown a.com until you get enough traffic on b.com
    – Helping Hands
    Apr 7, 2015 at 3:37

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We have gotten a few questions like this one. While I found one good answer for you, I thought I would take this opportunity answer the question better. There are actually two things to consider and not just one.

When you want to retain the links of an old site you have essentially two tasks: one, to redirect from one site to the other properly; two, replicate your old sites link profile on the new site the best that you can. I will explain.

Redirect:

First you will want to redirect your old site to your new site. It is not uncommon that the site structures do not mesh/align. This is okay. The greatest mistake you can make is to selectively redirect pages/directories from the old site to the new site. It is far better to make a blanket redirect from the old site to the new site. This will preserve the value of the old domain as much as possible.

Here is an example of a blanket redirect:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^oldsite\.com$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.oldsite\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You can also use this simpler example:

Redirect permanent / http://www.newsite.com/

Once this is done, on the new site you will want to make specific redirects.

Here are some examples of a specific page redirect:

Redirect permanent /about/aboutus.html  http://www.newsite.com/aboutus/
Redirect permanent /checkout/.*  http://www.newsite.com/purchase/
Redirect permanent /fashion/  http://www.newsite.com/clothing/
Redirect permanent /books/edgar-allen-poe.html  http://www.newsite.com/books/poe/complete-works.html

Once this is done, prepare for the day that you may want to shutdown your old site. This day always seems to come and it is far better to do the work sooner than to wait.

You will want to examine the incoming links to your old site and determine which ones are of value and which ones are not. Of the valuable links, if you can, see if you can have these links changed. Some may be within your control. Some you may have to contact the site owner or webmaster to have changed. Of these, not all will be changed. Do not worry about this. As well, ignore any low value links.

Once this is done, for each link that could not be changed, find new opportunities to create new links to replace them. I always advising working to create a greater link profile to the new site than exists for the old site. Once this is done, you will be free to delete the old domain should you chose to.

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  • Just to confirm, I do this to the oldsite.com/.htaaccess right? and after I do all this, when google crawl oldsite.com then if someone click oldster.com/clothing in google search, it will goes to new site.com/clothing correct?
    – dsc81
    Apr 10, 2015 at 1:26
  • The first set of code is an example that goes on the old site. Anyone who tries to access the old site will be redirected to the new site. Any request to the old site is redirected as-is to the new site.The second set of code is for the new site to match requests carried over from the old site to the structure of the new site. Each set of code goes in the .htaccess file of either the old or new site.
    – closetnoc
    Apr 10, 2015 at 1:59
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There's something to be said for an aged domain, generally the older the better, so it might be worth considering consolidating to oldsite.com.

That said, if the benefits of newsite.com outweigh the benefits of an aged domain I'd think it would be smart to consider migrating the content to the new site and implementing a cross-domain canonical link telling search engines that the page on newsite.com is the preferred URL for that content.

I'd also probably implement rel="author" and/or rel="publisher" just to be thorough and consistent with attribution.

After implementing cross-domain canonicals and authorship, I'd submit it to Google to be crawled, give it a couple months to ensure indexation and then do a 301 redirect.

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This requires you to carry out a 301 redirect, with which you can move to a new domain without affecting your SEO. Maybe you can refer to https://phpmatters.com/how-to-move-to-new-domain/ to get some inspirations.

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  • Using redirects sounds like a good approach to me. This would be a better answer if you could fill in some of the details rather than just providing a link. Can you add the syntax for redirecting to this answer?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    May 6, 2015 at 9:58

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