Fox 8 News, here in Cleveland, Ohio announced that they have a brand new domain. Being familiar with domain transfers, I was curious to see how they handled this task.

First, I went straight to Search Engine Saturation to see if the Search Engine’s were still indexing the old site — Google is still indexing the old domain www.myfoxcleveland.com and seeing 15,800 pages. Not surprisingly, Yahoo! continues to index the old domain and sees 17,485 pages along with MSN 22,100.

Next – how are they handling redirects? As I’ve discussed in the past, redirects are imperative for usability as well as SEO & rankings. Congrats to Fox 8 News – they have a 301 redirect that’s directing the Search Engines and traffic to the new domain which should help soften any rankings changes they might see during this time.

Here’s the big test – are the redirects implemented appropriately so that usability isn’t affected – oh boy, this isn’t good…

ALL (and by ALL I mean the 25 or so I tested) of the pages being indexed by the Search Engine’s are redirecting to the new domains homepage – yikes! This by all means isn’t the WORST case scenario, but it definitely isn’t BEST case.

Picture this, you have the school closing section of the old domain bookmarked so you can quickly check in the mornings if your kids have school or your friend sent you a link to a news story on the old domain – now when you go to visit those links, you get taken here: www.fox8.com and are forced to search all over again for that news piece or section of the site you  wanted to visit.

Ideally, each individual page would redirect to the corresponding article within the site which would help – I know, I know, this is a huge undertaking and might not be the best use of someone’s time.  The next-best-thing would be to look into the stats of the domain (before transferring it) to see what pages/sections of the site got the most traffic and which pages had the most entries into the site. Having this information and being able to implement custom 301 redirects to each area of the new domain would greatly help usability and keep visitors to the site engaged, instead of being frustrated and leaving.

It’s not too late Fox 8 News to implement those custom 301s!