Hi Marco,

as a client I was concerned about doing this for a redesign of our website about 18months ago.  However the transfer went very smoothly, the main thing the agency did was set up a pile of 301 redirects from the odl site so that all inbound links on the old site were redirected to the newsite and therefore all the traffic these were bringing in as well as the page rank were maintained.  the stats showed a 30% drop or so in the first month but rapidly recovered after that.  However i am sure there will be others who can give you a much better technical response than this.

good luck

John

http://new.oursite.com is just a sub domain. If you prefer opening a new domain then perhaps you may consider using 301 redirection from the old domain to the new one.

On 16:21:11 23 September 2008 MarcoBarra wrote:
>Because of technical difficulties in phasing the migration
>of our existing site to a new version, it has been
>suggested by our technical team that we should consider a
>new domain.
>
>Being aware that domain age plays an important role in
>SEO, I'm concerned of the potential impact this might have
>on our existing natural traffic.
>
>The proposed approach is as follows:
>
>http://www.oursite.com
>
>http://new.oursite.com
>
>As different sections get redeveloped, they will gradually
>be migrated from the current domain over to the new one,
>and once completed all new sections will be migrated back
>to the original domain.
>
>I'd appreciate your thoughts on this, and any suggestions
>on how we should be handling this instead if this is not
>the best approach from an SEO point of view.
>
>Regards,
>
>Marco

Hi Daniel,
 

Thanks for your input, I think we have found a reasonable alternative.

We will now run the two versions in parallel (current and new), but on separate domains. The new version will be hidden from bots to prevent the new domain being indexed.

The user will then be able to switch between the two versions at will but from an SE's point of view only the current one is indexable.

Once the new site is fully available, and all the necessary tweaks have been carried out then we will switch them around and handle all the necessary 301 redirects in one go.

I'm comfortable that this will minimise any impact the changes may have.

What do you think?

Regards,

Marco

On 09:16:22 24 September 2008 danielb wrote:

hi, Marco, how are you doing?

No answers but a few questions:

1. why do you need the new subdomain to do this? wouldn't a subdirectory work equally well?
2. could you just roll the updates over the top of the existing without the middle step?
3. will everyone see both subdomains, or is 'new' something that will only be shown to users after they login?
4. are you planning to have both new. & old. rank for your terms at the same time?

sorry to have so many questions, but it feels like there could be a simpler way of achieving what you're trying to do.

daniel

Brilliant, two top tips there... I have made note of these within the project documentation.

Thanks again for your help,

Marco