How risky is temporarily moving high value SEO pages to a brand new domain?
-
Hi,
I won't bore you with all the details but we may have to temporarily move part of an existing domain onto a separate domain for a couple of months. The content being moved includes most of our key branded and organic SERP pages. We've owned the new domain for years but it's never been live or indexed. After a couple of months, all the content will move back to the original domain but will move to a slightly different structure and different page names. Most of the page content will remain largely the same.
I"m concerned, but don't really have any experience with this kind of thing. Can anyone shed some light. Perhaps on a scale of 1 to 5 you could give me your thoughts:
1. Should be fine, as long as you set up all the redirects properly
5. Do everything in your power not to do it! Using the new domain and other factors will be problematic.
Thanks for any help you may be able to provide!
-
Ouch. That's a tricky one, but a 302 is likely your best bet if you HAVE to move to the new domain and then move them back to new URLs on the old domain with a 301, but why do the middle step of moving these pages to the new domain? If you're going to put them on new URLs on the old domain, why not just create those URLs and move the pages there? Any competent developer should be able to work around having pages on a domain remain live while development takes place in the background. Really the only instance I could see of having to part with your domain for a few months is if you lost ownership of it, other than that, I'd do what I could to avoid bouncing around on domains, especially as far as a brand is concerned.
-
Without knowing more info, other than that it's for a few months, here's the problem with doing 301 Redirects.
301 Redirects say "permanently moved". So the old pages fall out, the new pages get indexed.
Then a few months later, you move them back but to new URLs. So you do 301 redirects from the other site back to the new site.
With each 301 redirect stage, you lose a little value for each page. Two hops in a few months is just as likely to cause authority and trust concerns as much as anything.
So the questions then become:
How much of the site is this happening to?
Can the site afford to lose the SEO value of those pages temporarily?
If the answer to how much is "not a major portion of the site", and the answer to the last one is "we'll survive", then the proper solution would be to do a 302 Temporarily moved". Then, when they move back, to the actual 301 - from the primary existing URLs on the main site to the new URLs on the main site.
You lose the least long-term value this way.
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
-
SEO implications of moving fra a sub-folder to a root domain
I am considering a restructure of my site, and was hoping for some input on SEO implications which I am having some issues getting clarity in. (I will be using sample domains/urls because of language reasons, not an english site), Thinking about moving a site (all content) from example.com/parenting -> parenting.com. This is to have a site fully devoted to this theme, and more easily monitor and improve SEO performance on this content alone. Today all stats on external links, DA etc is related to the root domain, and not just this sub-department. Plus it would be a better brand-experience of the content and site. Other info/issues: -The domain parenting.com (used as example) is currently redirected to example.com/parenting. So I would have to reverse that redirect, and would also redirect all articles to the new site. The current domain example.com has a high DA (67), but the new domain parenting.com has a much lower DA (24). Question: Would the parenting.com domain improve it's DA when not redirected and the sub-folder on the high-DA domain is redirected here instead? Would it severly hurt SEO traffic to make this change, and if so is there a strategy to make the move with as little loss in traffic as possible? How much value is in having a stand-alone domain, which also is one of the most important keywords for this theme? My doubt comes mostly from moving from a domain with high DA to a domain with much lower DA, and I am not sure about how removing the redirect would change that, or if placing a new redirect from the subfolder on the current site would help improve it. Would some DA flow over with a 301 redirect? Thanks for any advice or hints to other documentation that might be of interest for this scenario 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Magne_Vidnes0 -
Moving to new platform
I am moving a site with great SEO and tons of pages to a new platform. Page names will all be different because they will not have the .html ending and names will change. It is on a system that does not support .htaccess. So, I don't have a way to do 301 redirects. How can I keep my competitive status? Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bhsiao0 -
Having 2 brands with the same content - will this work from an SEO perspective
Hi All, I would love if someone could help and provide some insights on this. We're a financial institution and have a set of products that we offer. We have recently joined with another brand and will now be offering all our products to their customers. What we are looking to do is have 1 site that masks the content for both sites so it appears as there are 2 seperate brands with different content - in fact we have a main site and then a sister brand that offers the same products. Is there anyway to do this so when someone searches for Credit Card from Brand A it is indexed under Brand A and same when someone searched for Credit Card from Brand B it is indexed under Brand B. The one thing is we would not want to rel:can the pages nor be penalised by googles latest PR algorithm. Hope someone can help! Thanks Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFCU1 -
301 from old site to new one , Should I point to home page or sub category page ?
Hey Seo Experts, I have a small website ranking for few terms like cabinets sale, buy etc . However what i have now decided is to launch a New website with more different products like living room furniture, wardrobes etc . Out of all these categories on new website Cabinets is one of the SubCategory . Now I do not want to have 2 websites . So wanted to 301 from small cabinets website to newly created website. Some of the doubts I have at the moment is ? 1 Should I REDIRECT 301 to sub category (i,e cabinets) which is purely related to Cabinets or Do a Redirect to HOME PAGE . As I also need more Authority to home page as well , as this is relatively new website ? 2 Second question related to this. If you have multiple sub domains does it divide the total authority & TF.Or it is just Ok to have multiple Sub domains if needed ? Any advice appreciated !! Thanks .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aus00070 -
New Domain VS New Page Backlink?
Assuming you've already got a link from:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam.at.Moz
sitea.com/page1 (Moz domain rank 55, Moz page rank 30) You have two choices for another link: 1. Another link on the same domain but a new page:
sitea.com/page2 (Moz domain rank 55, Moz page rank 30) 2. A link on a new domain but with a lesser domain & page rank
siteb.com/page1 (Moz domain rank 30, Moz page rank 20) Assuming you have no other links to your site - both sites are relevant to your industry, both 5 years old, both have the same number of visitors/external links/ads and the content and anchor text remains the same. Which will have a bigger impact on SERP movements? Sam0 -
Best domain extension is .com or .net for SEO ?
Best domain extension is .com or .net for SEO ? I wanna make site ,in that business directory ,travel guides , Hotels many more . I wanna target a one kw local search about 1,000,000 per month .domain name ofthat keyword already has taken by some one but .net remaining plz advice me to proceed .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0 -
Content on New Domain or Sub Directory of Existing Domain?
I have a client with a well aged, high DA site. They rank well for their wedding photography business in several cities. They are launching a new service which is related to photography (photobooths and flipbooks) which they built and developed content on a new domain. The existing domain has 0 links with a DA of 1. The site is brand new.. Is there any drawback to moving the existing content on the new domain to a sub directory of the high authority domain? EX: http://domain.com/newcompany The look, feel, and design of the new site / service is much different than the high DA site. My thoughts are that this will give them an automatic step up, especially since they will be marketing this in several major cities. Also, since the design will be different, if it is good to move to the subdir, should we put the new company name in the subdir folder or something keyword friendly like domain.com/photobooth as opposed to domain.com/newcompanyname. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | itrogers0 -
High number of items per page or low number with more category pages?
In SEO terms, what would be the best method: High number of items per page or low number with more pages? For example, this category listing here: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/90/fsx-civil-aircraft/ It has 10 items per page. Would there be any benefit of changing a listing like that to 20 items in order to decrease the number of pages in the category? Also, what other ways could you increase the SEO of category listings like that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640