The latest craze seems to be people who are re-branding and getting more then one url lately. This can be good and bad, depending upon you set up your website. This can lead to you have what is referred to as duplicate content, basically two websites with different url’s but they both have the same information. See this article by Google on duplicate content.
However, do not worry there is an easy way to fix this. You
If you set up your old url to just redirect to the new one it’s possible that you may be getting penalized for having duplicate content online. The best way to handle redirects is to create 301 redirects.
If you want to know if you should use a 301 redirect here are some of the situations it would help you.
- You have moved to a new domain, and you want to make it as easy as possible for existing clients to find you.
- You have several URLs that people use to find you. Such as http://mywebsite.com, http://www.mywebsite.com or http://home.mywebsite.com. The best idea is to pick one url as your preferred destination and set up 301 redirects to send traffic from your other URLs the url you want to make your primary domain. You can also set the preferred domain in your Google Webmaster tools as well, which will help.
- If you have changed or merged two different urls and you want to make sure that the old links still send people to you.
You can read more about 301 redirect here. The best way to set them up is to contact your web host. They will tell you where and how to place the file on your server so that it’s correct.
