301 redirect domain - best practices

[SEOmaverick]

Afternoon guys,

I'm 301 redirecting an established domain to another for rebranding purposes. We're doing this to gain a more brand-able name.

I've acquired an already established, related domain. One issue is the website was established under subdomain.sitename.com rather than www.

The obvious answer would be to 301 to www. But then the URL's will conflict with the URLs of the website that it's being 301 redirected to.

Would it make sense at this point to 301 to www.sitename.com/subfolder and have a single link in the navigation, that leads back to www.sitename.com as well as limit link juice routes in an attempt to filter as much of the link juice to the live website at /

Any advice would be appreciated. I'm a little unsure what to do with this one.

Thanks.

[SEOmaverick]

Sorry for my poor explanation in my opening post, I'm going to try again.

I have a successful website with almost 2 million members and a few hundred thousand pages of content, but the URL contains the word forum, which is exactly what the website was to begin with, but has become so much more. It leads advertisers and potential members to all the wrong conclusions. Both myself and my community want a new name that better reflects who we are and what we offer.

We settled on a name but it was already taken. The website was already established within our niche, had good content and PR. We come to a deal and acquired the new website, who's name we'll be using. It works for the that the new domain is already established as I'd not 301 redirect to a brand spanking new domain without first establishing it.

However, the new website and URL I acquired has been established at subdomain.domain.com rather than www.domain.com which is definitely what we'll be using. I would like to establish the www. of the new domain before I go ahead and 301 redirect our current URL to this new one.

At first I figured it was quite straight forward, 301 redirect the newly acquired websites subdomain to www.?

BUT at no point, do I want to lose the content or links of the newly acquired domain. Both the new and old website run from powerful CMS, with complex .htaccess files. They can't both coexist at www.newdomain.com, at least not without lots and lots of messing around.

I figured rather than 301 redirecting the new website from subdomain to www.newdomain.com I might as well 301 redirect it to www.newdomain.com/randomfoldername where it can stay and not interfere with my website when I finally come to 301 redirect www.currentdomain.com to www.newdomain.com

I really hope I've made more sense this time around as I'd love some feedback, it's given me quite a headache.

Thanks,

[regmac]

Ok, just to make sure I understand this one, let me draw what I have understood first.

You bought an established domain, www.newdomain.com. However, this domain was established using subdomain.newdomain.com.

You want to use www.newdomain.com instead of the subdomain.newdomain.com. However, you're worried about losing data and conflict between domains?

Well, if the www.newdomain.com and newdomain.com was previously redirected to the subdomain.newdomain.com, then I see no problem if you wanna reverse the way. Redirect newdomain.com and subdomain.newdomain.com to www.newdomain.com that's it.

And if the www.currentdomain.com serve no pages and will only be used to rebrand the www.newdomain.com, then it's already good for 301 redirect.

------------
Else,

if www.newdomain.com was not redirected to the subdomain.newdomain.com and was used to represent some other pages (like static pages). Then you might want to relocate the files pulled up by www.newdomain.com to another directory. ex. www.newdomain.com/extradir. Once done, point www.newdomain.com to the same directory the subdomain.newdomain.com was pointed. This'll have www.newdomain.com and subdomain.newdomain.com pull up the same pages. Once the changes propagated, you may then proceed to redirecting subdomain.newdomain.com to www.newdomain.com.

Same thing goes with your currentdomain.com if it is representing some other pages.

[hyperlite635]

I'm curious about this as well.