Another Move / DNS question....

[Crzipilot]

I've read through the posts regarding moving the site, and changing the config files. And have read about the DNS changes etc.... I just sorta want to make sure what I'm thinking can be done, because truthfully, I don't have a clue.


We have an old website that is hosted by XX. It's been up for a number of years, and it's Domain is YY. It's not a shopping cart and such, just statice web pages, and has pretty good rankings with google.

We stumbled into zen-cart, and started messing with it 6 months or so ago. We installed it on a different host and also put it under a different Domain name, of UU.

As we were playing it morphed into, we are going to make Zen Cart our live web site and store, but we did the whole thing under the new host site and the UU domain name.

In order to get our old domain name onto the new Zen Cart, all we have to do is, a DNS??? pointing to the new host, and change the config files in zen cart and it will work???

What will happen to the old site, and the page rankings etc....will google get upset that the old pages and such are no longer there? I read some stuff about redirects, but if our Domain is now at the new Zen cart, any links from google, will get a "page not found"

thanks for the info, if anyone can help...

Paul

Villagebears.com going to Steiffusawarehouse.com but need the villagebears.com name onto the Steiffusawarehouse.com site.....Ahhhh

[BlindSide]

In order to get our old domain name onto the new Zen Cart, all we have to do is, a DNS??? pointing to the new host, and change the config files in zen cart and it will work???

...and configure the host to manage the old domain. After that, yes, that's it.

What will happen to the old site, and the page rankings etc....will google get upset that the old pages and such are no longer there? I read some stuff about redirects, but if our Domain is now at the new Zen cart, any links from google, will get a "page not found"

You could pull over your old site, and have it sit next to your store. As long as it doesn't share any filenames with Zen pages, that would be fine. The exception of course is the old index file, which would obviously have to go away.

Yes, Google will reindex your site, and your rankings will likely shuffle. To avoid this as much as possible, you could mimic as much as you can in Zen Cart. Image names, meta tags, page text, titles, etc. The more it looks like your old site, the more the Google crawlers won't see a difference.

Of course, that's assuming you want to keep your old site format. If not, you'll just have to make your changes and resubmit. Fortunately, Google has some excellent tools for webmasters to help with this kind of stuff.