What do I do with an old site when a new one is built?
-
I have a customer that has a PR 4 website with over 3000 pages of content. He decided to build a brand new website with a new domain and it now has a PR of 2. Our question is, what do we do with the old site? Do we migrate all the content over to the new site and do redirects on all the pages? Do we keep the old site up and put links over to the new site? He was just planning on shutting it down but that seemed like a complete waste of PR and SEO. What is his best course of action? Thanks for your replies.
-
You should also set up Google Webmaster Tools for your old and new domains and then tell Google about your change of address. Log-in then go to Configuration>Change of Address
And here is some other information from Google that is useful to follow https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105
-
I agree 100% with your answer, checking where most of your backlinks are coming from is very important and changing them to your new website shouldn't be a problem; as well as do look at the deep links and redirect them to the new website as well.
-
Move whatever content makes sense and do 301 redirects. If there's no reason for that content to be there and if it's not bringing in any traffic, or if it is, either wya, it makes complete sense to move/migrate content that's relevant and then do 301's. Make sure you check where most of your backlinks are coming from and if you can get any of those links changed to the new website. I would also check for deep links to the old site and make sure, whatever URL those deep links were going to, are redirected to the new page on the new site. I hope this helps.
-
Hi. I am not a developer, so I can't give you an in-depth answer except to say that you absolutely must implement 301 redirects from your old pages to new in order to maintain your link equity from the old site. If you need more information on how to do this, let me know and I can get the required info.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Utilizing one robots.txt for two sites
I have two sites that are facilitated hosting in similar CMS. Maybe than having two separate robots.txt records (one for every space), my web office has made one which records the sitemaps for the two sites, similar to this:
Technical SEO | | eulabrant0 -
One robots.txt file for multiple sites?
I have 2 sites hosted with Blue Host and was told to put the robots.txt in the root folder and just use the one robots.txt for both sites. Is this right? It seems wrong. I want to block certain things on one site. Thanks for the help, Rena
Technical SEO | | renalynd270 -
Internal Ads on A Site
We serve ads on our site using a sub-domain. All ads use a re-direct from ads.domain before redirecting users to the proper, normal, internal url. Most the content on our home page is ad block driven. Is it possible and does it make sense to enter the sub-domain as url parameter in Google Webmaster tools, letting Google know that this is something to be ignored. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
How to handle mobile site with less pages than the main site?
We are developing a mobile version of our website that will utilize responsive design/dynamic serving. About 70% of the main website will be included in the mobile version. What (if anything) should be the redirect for pages not included in the mobile version of the site? Also - for one specific section users will be redirected from that page to the homepage, what is the redirect that should be used for this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Could multiple languagues on one site be bad for SEO???
Our site is has content in English and in Spanish. The spanish side was translated by me, Spanish is my first language, so i know that the translations are good and its original content. We were Pandalized/Penguinnized pretty bad earlier this year. We have completely cleaned our site of anything that could be considered thin content or grey hat techniques. An associate is telling me that we need to put the spanish version of the site on its own domain, does this make sense to anyone? The spanish side of the site gets only about 5% of the visitors, bu i still don't see the logic in taking all those pages and putting them on a different domain. Would this help recover from Panda/Penguin. Thanks
Technical SEO | | 858-SEO0 -
Ranking in more than one country
Hi, I have a website http://goo.gl/IrJz4 and currently it was ranking well in Google US serps. And now i want to rank well it india too. Does doing more links will bring the results or do i need to do any on page seo ? Please advice me.
Technical SEO | | Dexx220 -
Redirecting an Old Domain
One of my clients has a newish e-commerce website that was just redesigned. Part of this new marketing push is shutting down an old yahoo store. The problem is that this old store's domain has a 10 year old link in DMoz and is there fore in about 200 other directories. Is pointing that old domain at the new website going to be enough to keep all of that link juice flowing?
Technical SEO | | Simple_Machines0 -
New website with slightly new urls
Hi we recently designed our website in work and changed some of the urls. the old site used to be http://www.example.ie/contact-us.htm now it's is http://example.ie/get-in-touch The problem we are having is with sitelinks (the ones auto generate in the serp) ie: about, contact us, team etc etc. Once cliked on, these OLD links are all going to 404 pages because of the change of url. Help with this would be greatly appreciated - I was thinking of blocking these old sitelinks in google web master.
Technical SEO | | GlenBOB0