: Transition to new site I'm almost finished rewriting the website for a non-profit organization. The existing site receives ~5,000 a month. The new site is being written in ASP.Net and the existing

@Correia994

There is a nice Google webmaster summary about moving a site. It's not necessary to protect or hide the new site, in fact they recommend to 301 redirect section by section. I did a lot of migrations like you, with a DNS A record change. What generally works good are signals of trust, like: domain owner stays the same or ownership signals by using the webmaster tools.

In my experience hiding the new site is not strictly necessary. In the first hours, days and weeks watch out for 404's, 301-them to the best matching content on the new site; before the transition, use tools like opensiteexplorer.org to find the links. Make sure the new site has a sitemap.xml.

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@Courtney195

For testing purposes, you can set everything up behind a .htaccess login.

There are a lot of factors to think about in terms of SEO. If you're going to end up with a different URL structure than the original site, use 301 redirects to map old pages to the new equivalent.

If you are changing the content, you're going to have to watch title tags, headers and the content itself to see how it effects the rankings. A total redesign is actually a good chance to improve upon these things.

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