Temporary Duplicate Sites - Do anything?
-
Hi Mozzers -
We are about to move one of our sites to Joomla. This is one of our main sites and it receives about 40 million visits a month, so the dev team is a little concerned about how the new site will handle the load.
Dev's solution, since we control about 2/3 of that traffic through our own internal email and cross promotions, is to launch the new site and not take down the old site. They would leave the old site on its current URL and make the new site something like new.sub.site.com. Traffic we control would continue to the old site, traffic that we detect as new would be re-directed to the new site. Over time (the think about 3-4 months) they would shift the traffic all to the new site, then eventually change the URL of the new site to be the URL of the old site and be done.
So this seems to be at the outset a duplicate content (whole site) issue to start with. I think the best course of action is try to preserve all SEO value on the old URL since the new URL will eventually go away and become the old URL. I could consider on the new site no-crawl/no-index tags temporarily while both sites exist, but would that be risky since that site will eventually need to take those tags off and become the only site? Rel=canonical temporarily from the new site to the old site also seems like it might not be the best answer.
Any thoughts?
-
I'm going to throw in a completely different option, because in my opinion, messing with this kind of multiple version situation is going to put your huge website at massive risk of screwed up rankings and lost traffic no matter how tricky you get.
First, I'm assuming that significant high-level load testing has been done on the dev site already. If not, that's the place to start. (I'm suspecting a Joomla site for 40 million visits a month will have lots of load-balancing in place?)
Since by all indications, the sites will be identical to the visitor, I'd suggest switching to the new site, but keeping the original site immediately available in near-line status. By setting the TTL of the DNS to a very short duration while in transition, the site could be switched back to the old version within a minute or two just by updating the DNS if something goes pear-shaped on the new site.
Then, while the old site continues to serve visitors as it always has, devs can fix whatever issue was discovered on the new site.
This would mean keeping both sites' content updated concurrently during the period of the changeover, but it sounds like you were going to have to do that anyway. There's also the small risk that some visitors would have cached DNS on their own computers and so might still get sent to the new site for a while even after the DNS had been set back to the old site, but I'd say that's a vastly smaller risk than screwing up the rankings of the whole site.
Bottom line, there are plenty of load testing/quality assurance/server over-provisioning methods for making virtually certain the new site will be able to perform before going live. Having the backup site should be a very short term insurance, rather than a long term duplication process.
That's my perspective, anyway, having done a number of large-site migrations (though certainly nothing approaching 40M visits/month)
Paul
Just for refernce, I was involved in helping after just such a major migration where the multiple sites did get indexed. It took nearly a year to rectify the situation and get the rankings/traffic/usability back in order
-
Arghhh... This sounds like a crazy situation.
If the temp site is on a temporary subdomain, you definitely don't want any of those pages seeping into the index. But 3-4 months seems like an incredibly long time to sustain this. 3-4 days seems more reasonable to handle load testing.
For example, what happens when someone links to one of the temporary pages? Unless you put a rel canonical on the page, and allow robots to crawl it, then you won't gain from that link equity.
For a shorter time period, I'd simple block all crawlers via robots.txt, add a meta "noindex, nofollow" tag to the header, and hope for the best.
But for 3-4 months, you're taking the chance of sending very confusing signals to search engines, or losing out on new link equity. You could still use the meta "noindex, nofollow" on the temp domain if you need to, and also include rel=canonical tags (these are separate directives and actually processed differently) but there's no gaurentee of a smooth transistion once you ditch the temp urls.
So... my best advice is to convince your dev team to shorten the 3-4 month time frame. Not an easy job.
-
Wow 40 million visitors a month is no joke and nothing to be taken lightly if not done right the loss of traffic could be huge.
The new site should be non indexable and you can redirect a percentage of traffic to the new site (beta.site.com) for server load testing reasons and once you determine it is stable you can move it over to the new site.
Are URLs and site structure etc remaining the same? I wouldn't change too much at once or you won't know what happened if something tanks.
-
Thanks for the response.
It might have been just an unfounded concern, based on a vague memory of something I read about rel=canonical on here, but cannot find it now.
I was just concerned that if you have site A and B and rel=canonical from B to A, then eventually get rid of A and have B take on the URL of A, that the engines might interpret this oddly and have it affect domain authority.
-
Why do you think that canonical tags won't work?
That's what I would suggest.. Those tags simply tell Google which is the authoritative site of the duplicates. If you are preserving the original domain, canonical to that one and when you make the switch nothing will change. Do keep in mind if any of your directories or file structures are altered you will want to put in redirects but it sounds like your web team knows what they're doing here.
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
-
Duplicate ecommerce sites, SEO implications & others?
We have an established eCom site built out with custom php, dedicated SERPs, traffic, etc.. The question has arisen on how to extend commerce on social and we have found a solution with Shopify. In order to take advantage of this, we'd need to build out a completely new site in Shopify and would have to have the site live in order to have storefronts on Pinterest and Twitter. Aside from the obvious problem with having two databases, merchant processing, etc, does anyone know whether there are SEO implications to having two live sites with duplicate products? Could we just disavow a Shopify store in Webmaster Tools? Any other thoughts or suggestions? TIA!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PAC31350 -
Site Migration of 4 sites into 1?
Hi Guys, I have a massive project involving a migration of 4 sites into 1. 4 sites include: **www.MainSite.com ** www.E-commerce.com www.Membership.com www.ResearchStudy.com Goal of this project is to have 1-4 regrouped into Main Site I will be following the best practice from this post https://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos which has an awesome checklist. I am actually about to start Phase 3: URL redirect mapping. Because all of these sites have hundreds of duplicates, I figured I should first resolve the Main Site dup issues before creating the URL redirect mapping but what about the other domains (2,3,4) though? Should I first resolve the Dup issues on those ones as well or it is not necessary since they will be pointing into the Main Site new domain? I want to make sure I don't overwork the programming team and myself. Thanks For sharing your expertise and any tips on how should I move forward with this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Duplicate meta descriptions
Hi All Does having quite a few Duplicate meta descriptions hurt SEO. I am worried that I have too many and thinking this could be the reason for my recent drop in search visibility. Thanks in Advance. Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Bad site migration - what to do!
Hi Mozzers - I'm just looking at a site which has been damaged by a very poor site migration. Basically, the old URLs were 301'd to a page on the new website (not a 404) telling everyone the page no longer existed. They did not 301 old pages to equivalent new pages. So I just checked Google WMT and saw 1,000 crawl errors - basically the old URLs. This migration was done back in February, since when traffic to the website has never recovered. Should I fix this now? Is it worth implementing the correct 301s now, after such a timelapse?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Why is my site not ranked?
Hey, does enybody have an idea, why my site www.detox.si is not ranked for the KW detox in www.google.si (Slovenia). It is being indexed, but it does not rank and i have no idea why. Best, M.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Spletnafuzija0 -
Is this site worth subscribing to?
Hi everyone is, the below site worthwhile submitting to? I see one of our competitors is on here and the article they have published has in turn be picked up by other sites. Is the financial cost worth the back link reward? https://app.prweb.com/Main.aspx?Entity=Home
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hardley10 -
Can a Hosting provider that also hosts adult content sites negatively affect our SEO rankings on a non-adult site hosted on same platform?
We're considering moving a site to a host that also offers hosting for adult websites. Can this have a negative affect on SEO, if our hosting company is in any way associated with adult websites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0 -
The Site: search and Flow of PageRank
It is my understanding that if I do a search for site:mydomain.com the results are like every other SERP in that the most authoritative pages are ranked higher. So obviously I would expect my homepage to be first (in most cases), then followed by main category pages, etc. My question is has anybody ever seen disturbing results when doing this (i.e. pages that should have no authority outranking main category pages)? Is this always an issue with site structure or can you think of other factors that may cause this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | purch0