Can I get posts from a blog host and put them on a private website ?
-
Hello everybody !
My client has a blog for 2 years with many posts on overblog, a French blog host like Blogger. Now we are currently building a new website with a new blog within the site.
Those posts are valuable content that bring some traffic to the old blog. My idea was to re-publish those posts on the new blog to start with some good content. Unfortunately, the blog host don't let me use 301 redirects or re=canonical tags to tell search engines that the post is now in the new website and avoid duplicate content.
What is the best SEO solution in this case ? Can we delete the posts on the old blog and publish them in the new one ?
Thanks for your help!
Bruno
-
Thanks for sharing your point of view !
I will contact Overblog to see if we can do something for that. If not I will import all the posts and put a small text in the old blog with a link to the new location of the post.
-
Your options are pretty much limited!
You can:
- Email the customer serves and they might allow you to redirect from that blog to your new blog.
- Import the blog and upon the new blog (no SEO value)
- Leave a message to move to the new domain... This might not offer any SEO value but your true readers will defiantly going to shift towards the new blog.
Hope this helps!
-
Complain to overblog. Complain to them.
I am not kidding. Let them know that you are not happy. Look to see if others are complaining.
-
Your options are pretty limited. If over-blog won't work with you to set up 301 redirects, you may need to take down the content, upload it to its new destination, and replace the old pages with blurbs + links to the new articles.
You cannot put a rel=canonical tag anywhere but the header. So if you can't edit that, you're out of luck =/
-
You mention 301s and canonical not being available - are you absolutely sure? Try and ask the host again, sometimes when you get another customer service person you may get an answer. The canonical would be idea.
I would not delete the old posts. They have links to them and get traffic. Couple of ideas come to mind. You could basically write up a short original summary of each post and put it on the old blog. Then have something like, if you want more information, this article has moved to and then link to the new blog post. That would at least drive referral traffic and would take care of the duplicate issue. In the absence of a canonical link, having a link to the "original" does help give credit. The link to the new site would also work to give credit for the post to the new site. At the same time, this will be kind of messy as when you change the content on the posts on the old site, you could potentially mess up the rankings of those pages.
I would test this out. Select 10-20 articles from the old site, and see what happens. As a comparison, take another 10-20 and just cut off the blog post after 300 words and then link to the full article on the new site.
I will be honest, as I read my suggestion, this will be kind of messy. Go back and push for that canonical. You can then link and copy and you will be totally clean. All you need is access to the HEAD portion of the pages. They look to have a "premium" option if you pay, maybe that would give you access?
Good luck!
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
-
Redirecting Old Websites to New Websites
Hi Everyone, We are about to take down a number of websites in favour of a new singular B2B hub and would be looking to redirect all of these sites to the new home. For SEO purposes, what would be the best way to do this? Due to the difference in setups and scale of the site, it would be difficult to correctly match up each page to page between the sites for individual 301 redirects. Could someone advise on the best plan of action? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chbiz0 -
Can you create town focused landing pages for a website without breaking Google guidelines?
I recently watched a webmaster video that said that town focused landing pages are seen as doorway pages if they only exist to capture search traffic. And then I read that just because you can sell your product/service in a certain area, doesn't mean you can have a page for it on your website. Is it possible to create town focused landing pages for a website without breaking Google guidelines?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream1 -
Effect of Publishing Blog Posts Resembling Classified Advertisements
Our site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) markets commercial real estate for lease in New York City. Any potential negative impact in terms of ranking and traffic by using our blog post in an unconventional manner? I am considering publishing a weekly post describing the latest commercial listings for lease. The post would be formatted and resemble classified advertising appearing in such newspapers as The New York Times. The ads are concise and appealing. Property listings drive a high click thru rate, so I believe blogs posts based on property listings and formatted like old newspaper ads might really improve visitor engagement. Each add could have a link to a corresponding listing page. Would using the blog in this manner every week have a detrimental effect or could prove beneficial? Thoughts??? lr6MIiR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Can we do Citation posting for national business?
I have payment gateway website, website provide services to US and other countries as well. Can I do citation posting for the website? Website is having contact us page with US address on it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marknorman0 -
Title tags seem to be going against Rand and suggestions here, what can I do? Can you help me please?
Hi to all, Ok so I have been beating myself up trying to figure out how to create a good ranking title for my websites homepage. My competition uses commas in its title tags But these are 100% against what Rand and many posts say here. I watched his whiteboard where he says don't use commas. There are posts that say, don't use commas. The biggest one is mortonbuildings(dot)com - followed by - lesterbuildings(dot)com They basically have the same title tags with commas. So what's the catch here? What am I missing? of course these sites have Great Domain Authority, but I swear what they are doing is going against what Rand and many other seo professional's are preaching. I thought it should read better for visitors? But to me it looks like keyword stuffing with a brand name? Any help is greatly appreciated to let me know if these commas and strategies are good to do? or bad news? Again thank you for your time to help a small business. Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | asbchris0 -
Website Migration and SEO
Recently I migrated three websites from www.product.com to www.brandname.com/product. Two of these site are performing as normal when it comes to SEO but one of them lost half of its traffic and dropped in rankings significantly. All pages have been properly redirected, onsite SEO is intact and optimized, and all pages are indexed by Search engines. Has anyone had experience with this type of migration that could give some input on what a possible solution could be? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexVelazquez0 -
Website not being indexed after relocation
I have a scenario where a 'draft' website was built using Google Sites, and published using a Google Sites sub domain. Consequently, the 'same' website was rebuilt and published on its own domain. So effectively there were two sites, both more or less identical, with identical content. The first website was thoroughly indexed by Google. The second website has not been indexed at all - I am assuming for the obvious reasons ie. that Google is viewing it as an obvious rip-off of the first site / duplicate content etc. I was reluctant to take down the first website until I had found an effective way to resolve this issue long-term => ensuring that in future Google would index the second 'proper' site. A permanent 301 redirect was put forward as a solution - however, believe it or not, the Google Sites platform has no facility for implementing this. For lack of an alternative solution I have gone ahead and taken down the first site. I understand that this may take some time to drop out of Google's index, however, and I am merely hoping that eventually the second site will be picked up in the index. I would sincerely appreciate an advice or recommendations on the best course of action - if any! - I can take from here. Many thanks! Matt.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | collectedrunning0 -
Robots.txt: Can you put a /* wildcard in the middle of a URL?
We have noticed that Google is indexing the language/country directory versions of directories we have disallowed in our robots.txt. For example: Disallow: /images/ is blocked just fine However, once you add our /en/uk/ directory in front of it, there are dozens of pages indexed. The question is: Can I put a wildcard in the middle of the string, ex. /en/*/images/, or do I need to list out every single country for every language in the robots file. Anyone know of any workarounds?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IHSwebsite0