Question on Moving Content
-
I just moved my site from a Wordpress hosted site to Squarespace. We have the same domain, however, the content is now located on a different URL (again, same base domain).
I'm unable to easily set up 301 redirects for the old content to be mapped to the new content so I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for a workaround. Basically, I want to make sure google knows that Product A's page is now located at this new URL. (www.domain.com/11245 > www.domain.com/product-a).
Maybe it's something that I don't have to worry about anymore because the old content is gone? I mean, I have a global redirect set up that no matter what you enter after the base domain, it now goes to the homepage but I just want to make sure I'm not missing something here.
Really appreciate your help!
-
Hey There
I've not used Squarespace but this looks like your answer here: http://help.squarespace.com/guides/how-do-i-create-url-shortcuts-or-mappings
I think they are calling them "shortcuts" or "mappings" and not "redirects" but looks like it achieves what you need. As others have said the global catch all isn't very ideal, you should definitely individually redirect old pages.
Hope that helps!
-
HI,
If I understand correctly, you have your old site on Wordpress and now you switch over to another CMS (Squarespace). You can set up your redirect in Wordpress. You can download a redirect plugin to do so or if you are already using a SEO plugin on Wordpress, they should offer 301 redirects.
The global redirect will help redirect all the traffic from the old site to the new site which is good. However, that is not the best practice when visitors want to visit Content A on the old site and then it redirects to your new site's HP. They would simply leave the site because they are not seeing what they were looking for. It would be best to redirect www.olddomain.com/content-a >>> www.newdomain.com/content-a
-
When you are porting a website, there are several key considerations.
Do you have access to Google Analytics? Google Webmaster Tools? Historical data?
Besides Google SERPs, your traffic may be coming from many different sources. How many are REFERRED from other sites, via external links? How many are DIRECT traffic from old visitors who saved the URL as a favorite, or e-mailed the old URL to a friend?
That is why you need to know your top landing pages, and make sure to handle redirecting old URLs to new URLs.
-
Since you are changing the URLs, is there any way to redirect each of you OLD URLs to their corresponding new URL? Unless you can do that, your porting will be one step forward, two steps back. Until Google ranks all your new pages (URLs) it will be hit-or-miss. Google may take days, weeks, or months to rank and settle your new URLs into the SERPs.
-
Thanks for the response! Unfortunately, the integrated Squarespace solution that you mention doesn't work for me because the content was hosted on another site according to their customer service. Not sure if this may make you suggest anything out of the box? Thanks again for your help. It's appreciated!
-
Just about every CMS out there has a way to set up 301 redirects from your old content to the new URLs. I did a quick Google search for "squarespace 301 redirect" and found several sites with tutorials on how to do that. I believe it's related to shortcuts, although I haven't used Squarespace before.
I would try your best to redirect as much of the old content to the new content. You might even take a look at your site's backlinks and see if there are any links to internal pages on your site (rather than to your home page). Those links are the ones you're going to want to redirect.
I would also take a look at Google Webmaster Tools and see the errors there. They'll point out the most important ones to get corrected, and I would go ahead and set up redirects for those pages that are listed.
A redirect for all the content, including what you're calling a "global redirect" is okay, but it's more like a last resort than what I recommend. If you can redirect an old URL to the new location that is preferred.
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
-
To subdomain or to subfolder, that is the question.
Hi All, So I have a client that has two restaurants that they are wanting two sites for. Right now they have one site for their two locations that ranks pretty well for some bigger keywords for their style of food. With them wanting two sites, i'm struggling on whether we should just build them all within one site and just use separate folders on that site restaurant.com/location1 & restaurant.com/location2 with a landing page sending you to each, or if we should split it into subdomains. The content will be roughly the same, the menus are identical, i think each branch is just owned by a different family member so they want their own site. I keep leaning towards building it all into one site but i'm not sure. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | insitemoz10 -
Internal Duplicate Content Question...
We are looking for an internal duplicate content checker that is capable of crawling a site that has over 300,000 pages. We have looked over Moz's duplicate content tool and it seems like it is somewhat limited in how deep it crawls. Are there any suggestions on the best "internal" duplicate content checker that crawls deep in a site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tdawson091 -
Sites in multiple countries using same content question
Hey Moz, I am looking to target international audiences. But I may have duplicate content. For example, I have article 123 on each domain listed below. Will each content rank separately (in US and UK and Canada) because of the domain? The idea is to rank well in several different countries. But should I never have an article duplicated? Should we start from ground up creating articles per country? Some articles may apply to both! I guess this whole duplicate content thing is quite confusing to me. I understand that I can submit to GWT and do geographic location and add rel=alternate tag but will that allow all of them to rank separately? www.example.com www.example.co.uk www.example.ca Please help and thanks so much! Cole
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColeLusby0 -
How To Internationalize - Big Question
Hi all, Here is a big question. We have a long-established good content website with a .co.uk domain. The site is UK focussed. However, we are planning a new feature which will be UK and worldwide. So do we: 1. Keep it all on our .co.uk ? 2. Put the non-UK parts on a .com domain ? We don't have any content as such for a separate domain, and are not planning any. But, we are not sure if for example US users would be unimpressed with a UK domain. We could fudge it with "co.uk/us" etc. (Notice how we have not mentioned Google. Fed-up chasing big G the whole time. We just want to concentrate on our users and the service we provide to them. But G remains the elephant crapping in the corner of the room.) Also, we are asking this question before we let our developers and designers get to work. Basically we value Moz community opinions over and above theirs. Realise this is a big question, but you have big brains. Please chip in.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dexm100 -
Blog content - what to do, and what to avoid in terms of links, when you're paying for blog content
Hi, I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website. I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site. That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website. What would you advise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Duplicate content mess
One website I'm working with keeps a HTML archive of content from various magazines they publish. Some articles were repeated across different magazines, sometimes up to 5 times. These articles were also used as content elsewhere on the same website, resulting in up to 10 duplicates of the same article on one website. With regards to the 5 that are duplicates but not contained in the magazine, I can delete (resulting in 404) all but the highest value of each (most don't have any external links). There are hundreds of occurrences of this and it seems unfeasible to 301 or noindex them. After seeing how their system works I can canonical the remaining duplicate that isn't contained in the magazine to the corresponding original magazine version - but I can't canonical any of the other versions in the magazines to the original. I can't delete the other duplicates as they're part of the content of a particular issue of a magazine. The best thing I can think of doing is adding a link in the magazine duplicates to the original article, something along the lines of "This article originally appeared in...", though I get the impression the client wouldn't want to reveal that they used to share so much content across different magazines. The duplicate pages across the different magazines do differ slightly as a result of the different Contents menu for each magazine. Do you think it's a case of what I'm doing will be better than how it was, or is there something further I can do? Is adding the links enough? Thanks. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Advanced Squidoo Question
Hi, I am looking for someone with a lot of experience with building links to your money site using Squidoo. I have a ton of squidoo lenses set up, i recently created back linking reports for a number of squidoos to see if the squidoo was appearing as a link. They were not. Only one out of my 53 lenses is appearing. Tons of them are already featured lenses ( Not work in progress) What does it take to get a squidoo to become an active link in a link profile? Thanks guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielblinman0 -
Login Page = Duplicate content?
I am having a problem with duplicate content with my log in page QuickLearn Online Anytime - Log-in
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | QuickLearnTraining
http://www.quicklearn.com/maven/login.aspx
QuickLearn Online Anytime - Log-in
http://www.quicklearn.com/maven/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=/maven/purchase.aspx?id=BAM-SP
QuickLearn Online Anytime - Log-in
http://www.quicklearn.com/maven/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=/maven/purchase.aspx?id=BRE-SP
QuickLearn Online Anytime - Log-in
http://www.quicklearn.com/maven/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=/maven/purchase.aspx?id=BTAF
QuickLearn Online Anytime - Log-in
http://www.quicklearn.com/maven/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=/maven/purchase.aspx?id=BTDF What is the best way to handle it? Add a couple sentences to each page to make it unique? Use a rel canonical, or a no index no follow or something completely different? Your help is greatly appreciated!0