How can I redirect traffic from the old location of my website to a new location?
JV asked:
I am moving my website to a different address, as my account on the first address is expiring. I get a fair number of hits through Google on my first location, so I am wondering if there is anything I can do to “re-index” my site at the new location (e.g. is there any way I can let search bots know I am moving URLs through the use of HTML tags and so on)? Redirecting from the old site to the new site directly will not work, as I will have no access to the old site whatsoever and it will be taken down. I don’t want people to try and access my old site after it has been taken down and not know that I have moved.
I am moving my website to a different address, as my account on the first address is expiring. I get a fair number of hits through Google on my first location, so I am wondering if there is anything I can do to “re-index” my site at the new location (e.g. is there any way I can let search bots know I am moving URLs through the use of HTML tags and so on)? Redirecting from the old site to the new site directly will not work, as I will have no access to the old site whatsoever and it will be taken down. I don’t want people to try and access my old site after it has been taken down and not know that I have moved.
July 31, 2009 at 4:56 AM
July 31, 2009 at 9:43 PMcasey
Changing your domain name will cause problems with your search engine rankings, and it will take a while to get them back. Google will find you fairly quickly and you can submit your site to pretty much all major search engines to make them aware of your new site.
Here’s a site to submit your new location to many search engines at once:
If possible, you should try to keep your old site up as long as possible, even if it means you need to move it to a new host. Here is a page with some good tips and tells how to redirect without using the meta refresh tag but rather with methods within Apache and IIS (which are good for the search engine spiders):
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