Leaving a forwarding address...

[Melanie]

This weekend, I'll be moving a site from a subdirectory at one domain to its own domain. The site is in good standings with google and several other search engines at this time. I obviously don't want to jeopardize that. My plan at this point is to place .htaccess Redirect Permanent directives at the old site leading visitors (and search engines?) to the new domain.

Is this the best approach or is there a better one? I will go 'round to the various search engine sites and update my information but I know how long that can take to happen.

Thanks!

[rmjvol]

Quote from Google engineer that wrote their redirect code:
In an ideal world, you would create the new site and then have every page of the old site give a 301 (permanent) redirect to the corresponding page of the new site. This is correct according to the RFCs, and it will minimize the disruption to your Google ranking.

http://www.searchengineworld.com/newsletter/2001/google.htm

A 301 should take care of the better spiders like google & fast without you resubmitting. Unless you're paying Inktomi, just wait & hope. With AltaVista, there's +&- to resubmitting. If you've got great ranking on AV, I'd leave it alone. If you're in directories like Yahoo & ODP, you need to do those manually.

But for the other 7,234,871,020 so called search engines, it's probabaly not worth the time to mess with them unless you know you're getting referrals from them.

Good luck,
rmjvol

[Melanie]

Great! Thanks for the info. Sounds like I just need to create a few 301 redirects and update my listing with ODP and Yahoo. That's not too bad. :cheers: