Fern Grove

I thought I would post this for advice, as it's something a lot of designers have to deal with on a regualr basis -a redesign of an established site, and advice may be usefull .

This new version of the site will go live soon and I want to make sure I do it correctly. Since joining seochat, I have had my eyes opened :shock!:

So, here's the situation, what I am doing, my questions:

1. We have done a redesign of an established site, it currently has a PR4, pretty low I think, for it has a lot of inbound links and is well-establishd.
old/current site: http://www.ferngrove.com
new site: http://www.ferngrove.com/tmp/
The new site is temporarily housed here with a dissallow in the robots.txt for /tmp/ -it has not been spidered yet, so apparently it works.

2. They unfortunately share the url with a Australian Winery:
http://www.ferngrove.com.au/
it shows up in dance tool results -does this hurt and what can be done?

3. I am working on the meta tags now, emphasizing those that are included in the pages as text.

4. We will have permanent redirects for all the old urls and a custom 404 that includes the top nav menus (if their server allows. )

5. I would like to see their PR go up to at least a 5, they have many inbound links from a lot of B&B sites and Sonoma vacation sites.

6. Obviously, we will not go live during the Dance -so there won't be any 404's but when would you choose to birth a new version? -twixt Dance and freshbot? twixt freshbot and dance?

thanks ahead for any looks and advice!

-cris

1. May I ask why the title was changed to "Welcome at ..". In my opinion this wold dilute the importance of the Fern Grove keywords.

2. No problems, although they may give you some competition for searches on ferm grove at some point.

3., 4. OK

5. PR will only increase with more links, or if existing links get better PR themselves. Will you be working on links for them?

6. Go live now or very soon, even during the dance if you want - it won't be a problem. You need to go live before Googlebot starts deep-crawling again after the dance - normally a few days after. If you go live after the deep-crawl you'll even miss the dance after this one.

Gringo.

Ah!!!! Nice catch, I missed it -it's Rich's fault... he says it's my fault. Rich's first language was elvish, so he has trouble with his at's and to's ;-)

We'll cross that bridge...

Thanks Gringo, but I doubt it will be for another two weeks, I wish it was this weekend but.....