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301 redirects should I or shouldn't I?

I own and run the site thelocalgolfer.com - we get a pretty good amount of traffic, have PR4 page ranks on a lot of pages, and are pretty well known in the golfing community. We have plans to expand throughout the entire country by the end of the year. With these grand plans we also decided to buy the domain localgolfer.com (basically getting rid of the "the") to add a little easier domain to say.

So my question is should I do a 301 redirect and move my domain to localgolfer.com? Or should I just keep it as is it is? What are the ramifications of each?

Thanks experts!

Neil

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

freshcontent

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kuzmanovicb

Without "The" url sound much cleaner.
You need to do 301 from old site to new one.
If You are on Apache web server use .htaccess mod rewrite to redirect old domain to new one.

Best Regards

neilsav

ASKER

I appreciate both responses, does anyone know if backlinks that are 301 redirected still count as "votes" to the new redirected domain?

kuzmanovicb

I think after some time they will not count anymore, You should change them as much as possible

Tony McCreath

Keep it as is.

Don't take the risk of losing traffic just to drop the word "the", Listen to @freshcontent

301 redirects are the best option for changing URLs but Google themselves have said they leak ranking juice. So it's best to avoid them.

freshcontent

neilsav - yes 301 redirects used by backlinks will still count as "votes", but they are imperfect and Google and Bing experiments that I've seen have shown that they do not count as much as direct links that are not 301'd.

301 redirects are useful, but if you can avoid them entirely, it is MUCH better.

SOLUTION

m_walker

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