As the SEO specialist for the RentIn Group I am responsible for the smooth operation of Search Engine Marketing and natural rankings within the search engines !  Under normal circumstances the development of the Apartment Rentals / Villa Rentals sites for locations across Spain is generally business as usual, yet the original Nerja site needs a slight name change to fit in with the other websites representing areas such as Mijas, Marbella and Javea.

Now this is a worrying time!  The transfer of content etc is not the problem, its keeping the visitor traffic from the search engines coming to the site which presents the problem when changing domain names.  Why? . . . because all of the links already listed by Google are all pointing to the old domain name, which provides the “authority” count for Google as part of its valuation on how important the site is compared to every other site on the same subject.  So the question for me is how do I go about transferring all of this good ‘authority’ indexed by Google – over to the new domain and avoid loosing our position within Googles Search Results.

Clearly there’s a lot of links within Blogs, reviews and forums where folk have referenced the Nerja Villa Rentals web site and there’s very little chance of getting those links changed, so we run the risk of losing the “link juice” from most of them.  Thankfully we are holding onto the original domain and and there’s what is called a permanent redirect (code 301) that we can set on the original domains server which informs the search engines, when they follow the original links to the original site, that there is a new location for the content of the page and this new location for the Nerja Villa Rentals will be updated over time within the search engines and the transfer of most of the “authority” value of a site should move over to the new domain.

Google’s Matt Cutts mentioned in his blog that its a good idea to leave up the 301 redirections on the old domain for at least 18months…   clearly because there’s not guarantee that Google will cover the whole of the inbound links/web pages of a sight within a shorter period of time.  Of course, this means continuing to pay the domain and hosting fees of the old domain along with the new domain.  However, under the circumstances and the importance of maintaining a decent position within Google for Nerja Accommodation Rental then we have no other option.

With thanks to TheDon Sansone of Hosting and SEO firm Web-asylum.com

Categories : Lora's Posts