migrating to a new site, kill the old or redirect?

[thecompu-doctor]

I have two sites for my company, the original at http://thecompu-doctor.com and the new one at http://richmondcomputerdoctor.com. They are both Word Press based. Now the original one has pretty decent organic SEO in my area and I've been quite happy with its results. However, I was never quite happy with the polish. So I built the new one with a bit more professional appeal to it. Its been live for a few months now.

So what I want to know is, what is the best way to fully migrate to the new site? Should I put a redirect on the old site that bounces the person over to the new site? Or should I backup the new site and then restore it over top of the original site? This would then give me two of the same exact sites at two different addresses.

I know the redirect is technically easiest, but I don't want to kill off my organic SEO of the original site.

Any advice will be much appreciated.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Why would you create a whole new URL and domain name just because you dislike the look of your old site? Keep the SEO and transform the look of the old site into the new. Having more then one URL is diluting your customer base which is plain dumb.

 

[thecompu-doctor]

Because i wanted to take my time building the new site, plus i prefer the new URL.

 

[Tony_Scarpelli]

I have two sites and my second site which I have been promoting with SEO, adwords and yellowpages and the rest has not caught up to my original 15 year old domain. So the providence of the old domain is powerful.

I am unsure how many if any backlinks you lose by changing text, paragraphs and information on your old site as if something is removed which had a back link will you lose it? Not sure.

I had some old black hat on my 15 year old domain and once I removed it and replaced it with a static but someone informative if not stale website it shot up to PR2 and 1st in most google searches for our key terms. I have not changed in since (about 1 1/2 years ago).

The new 1 1/2 yr old site, despite hundreds of hours of adding quality content, I constantly upgrade pages, more information, optimize, increase readability, graphics, prettier, newer, fresher looks and it has barely gotten on the first page of our term searches.