Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Moving to a new site while keeping old site live
-
For reasons I won't get into here, I need to move most of my site to a new domain (DOMAIN B) while keeping every single current detail on the old domain (DOMAIN A) as it is. Meaning, there will be 2 live websites that have mostly the same content, but I want the content to appear to search engines as though it now belongs to DOMAIN B. Weird situation. I know.
I've run around in circles trying to figure out the best course of action. What do you think is the best way of going about this?
- Do I simply point DOMAIN A's canonical tags to the copied content on DOMAIN B and call it good?
- Should I ask sites that link to DOMAIN A to change their links to DOMAIN B, or start fresh and cut my losses?
- Should I still file a change of address with GWT, even though I'm not going to 301 redirect anything?
-
Thanks for your rseponses!
Hey RobertJakobson, doesn't Google advise against having canonical and noindex on the same page? And if you setup canonicals + change of address, what would be the purpose of noindexing?
-
Great question. Unless and until site B develops it's own new link profile and/or gets site A's pages 301'd to site B, in most moderately competitive searches, site B won't produce search-wise like site A (assuming site A produces).
I would therefor, if at all possible in your particular situation, set search expectations accordingly low and/or move as quickly as possible to 301ing the old pages to their new versions. Canonical tags to tell Google that site B is the one true copy of the content will of course not substitute for a good link profile plus old pages 301'd. It will be content without authority.
Maybe you can't ever get rid of site A as your question implies, in which case realize site B will not perform as well search-wise and set expectations accordingly.
Either way, get a list of all the external/incoming links to site A and work to get them updated to site B. This may be a lot of slow pick and shovel work, depending on what's in place already.
If you can anticipate after some reasonable amount of time 301ing old pages to new pages, skip Robert's 2 & 3 as you'd want Google still crawling the old urls to discover the eventual 301s.
Best of luck!
-
Hi, here're the 3 steps that should work easily:
- Add the canonical URL-s as you already know how. Wait for the new domain to rank. But don't stop there.
- After you've seen new domain rising place robots.txt and no-index meta tags on the old site instructing Google not to index it.
- Use Google Webmaster Tools to request Site Removal for the old site: under Google index -> Remove URL-s place the full domain of your old site. You should see that instead of a "page removal" you will be asked to confirm a "site removal". More instructions here from Google.
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
-
Move domain to new domain, for how much time should I keep forwarding?
I'm not sure but my website looks like is not getting it's juice as supposed to be. As we already know, google preferred https sites and this is what happened to mine, it was been crawling as https but when the time came to move my domain to new domain, I used 301 or domain forwarding service, unfortunately they didn't have a way to forward from https to new https, they only had regular http to https, when users clicked to my old domain from google search my site was returned to "site does not exist", I used hreflang at least that google would detect my new domain been forwarding and yes it worked but now I'm wondering, for how much time should I keep the forwarding the old domain to the new one, my site looks like is not going up, I have changed all the external links, any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fulanito1 -
How Can I Redirect an Old Domain to Our New Domain in .htaccess?
There is an old version of http://chesapeakeregional.com still floating around the web here: http://www.dev3.com.php53-24.dfw1-2.websitetestlink.com/component/content/category/20-our-services. Various iterations of this domain pop up when I do certain site:searches and for some queries as well (such as "Diagnostic Center of Chesapeake"). About 3 months ago the websitetestlink site had files and a fully functional navigation but now it mostly returns 404 or 500 errors. I'd like to redirect the site to our newer site, but don't believe I can do that in chesapeakeregional.com's .htaccess file. Is that so and would I need access to the websitetestlink .htaccess to forward the domain? Note* I (nor anyone else in our organization) has the login for the old site. The new site went live about 9 months before I arrived at the organization and I've been slowly putting the pieces together since arriving.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smpomoryCRH0 -
Splitting One Site Into Two Sites Best Practices Needed
Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own. The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter. The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time. Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances. For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Splitting and moving site to two domains - How to redirect
I have a client who is going to split their retail and wholesale business and rebrand the retail biz. So let’s say they are going to move everything from currentdomain.com to either retaildomain.com or wholesaledomain.com. The most important business for them is the retail site, so they want to pass on as much ranking power as they can from currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com. I see two choices here: We can 301 redirect all of currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com, and then redirect any wholesale pages to wholesaledomain.com. The advantage is that we can use GSC’s change of address tool to report the change to Google. The downside is that there is a redirect chain (2 hops) to wholesaledomain.com. Would this confuse Google? Or we can 301 redirect page by page from currentdomain.com to the appropriate page on either new site. This means no redirect chains but it also means that we can’t use GSC’s change of address tool. Which would you do and why? And is there another option that I'm missing? I appreciate any insights you can share.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rich.owings1 -
Question about moving content from one site to another without a 301
I could use a second opinion about moving content from some inactive sites to my main site. Once upon a time, we had a handful of geotargeted websites set up targeting various cities that we serve. This was in addition to our main site, which was mostly targeted to our primary office and ranked great for those keywords. Our main site has plenty of authority, has been around for ages, etc. We built out these geo-targeted sites with some good landing pages and kept them active with regularly scheduled blog posts which were unique and either interesting or helpful. Although we had a little success with these, we eventually saw the light and realized that our main site was strong enough to rank for these cities as well, which made life a whole lot easier, not to mention a lot less spammy. We've got some good content on these other sites that I'd like to use on our main site, especially the blog posts. Now that I've got it through my head that there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, I understand that I could just start moving this content over so long as I put a 301 redirect in place where the content used to be on these old sites. Which leads me to my question. Our SEO was careful not to have these other websites pointing to our main site to avoid looking like we were trying to do something shady from a link building perspective. His concern is that these redirects would undermine that effort and having a bunch of redirects from a half dozen sites could end up hurting us somehow. Do you think that is the case? What he is suggesting we do is remove all of the content that we'd like to use and use Webmaster Tools to request that this content be removed from the index. Then, after the sites have been recrawled, we'll check for ourselves to confirm they've been removed and proceed with using the content however we'd like. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeeAbrahamson0 -
Moving half my website to a new website: 301?
Good Morning! We currently have two websites which are driving all of our traffic. Our end goal is to combine the two and fold them into each other. Can I redirect the duplicate content from one domain to our main domain even though the URL's are different. Ill give an example below. (The domains are not the real domains). The CEO does not want to remove the other website entirely yet, but is willing to begin some sort of consolidation process. ABCaddiction.com is the main domain which covers everything from drug addiction to dual diagnosis treatment. ABCdualdiagnosis.com is our secondary website which covers everything as well. Can I redirect the entire drug addiction half of the website to ABCaddiction.com? With the eventual goal of moving everything together.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
Why does a site have no domain authority?
A website was built and launched eight months ago, and their domain authority is 1. When a site has been live for a while and has such a low DA, what's causing it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optimalwebinc0