New website from scratch and redirects or maintaining domain?
-
Hi friends,
I have to face a big challenge. My client has an online store with about 250 products. The store is based on a web service provider whose CMS gives critical duplicate content issues. My client is considering to rethink the store from scratch and choose a CMS that offers more guarantees. I have two options:
- Starting the store from scratch with new domain and make redirects (whole domain or page to page?)
- Maintaining the domain, careful to keep the current structure of the URL, which is currently pretty bad
I hope you could help me. Thanks in advance.
-
First thing I would look at when considering the changes your are is how well is the current website doing in the SERPs - does it get much search engine traffic? Is the domain name itself important to the business?
I would look at keeping the domain and look at either addressing the current duplicate content issue with canonicalization or changing your CMS and pointing the old urls to new corresponding ones using 301 redirects. I have done this successfully in the past when changing the URL structure of a site and I didn't have a negative impact on search traffic, in fact quite the opposite. That way you are passing on most of the value gained by any links to the old URLS and then you can concentrate on the new CMS and all of its benefits including implementing a new user friendly structure, without having to worry about the old structure and following it..
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
-
Hreflang and canonical tag for new country specific website - different base domain
I have a little different situation compared to most other questions which asks for hreflang and canonical tags for country specific version of websites. This is an SEO related question and I was hoping to get some insight on your recommendations. We have an existing Australian website - say - ausnight.com.au now we want to launch a UK version of this website - the domain is - uknight.co.uk please note, we are not only changing from .com.au to .co.uk.... but the base domain name as well changed - from ausnight to uknight as you can understand, the audience for both websites is different. Both websites has most pages same with same contents.... the questions I have is - Should we put canonical tag on the new website pages? If we don't put canon tag on new website pages, what is the impact on the SEO ranking of current website? I believe we need to put hreflang tag on both websites to tell google that we have another language version (en-au vs en-gb) of the same page. Is this correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TinoSharp0 -
Should I do a redirect
Hello, I am building a new website with a new web address for subpages. The domain name stays the same. I am wondering if I should do redirect to the few pages that have an outside link going to them. I noticed all my subpage that don't have any external link have an authority of 18. I only have 1 subpage that has 2 external links and 1 of them has a spam score of 32 and then other one of 1. My website is about a 100 pages. What should I do for my subpages redirect , not redirect, redirect only the ones that have external links ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
One website with multiple advertising domains?
Working on a website for a business with distinct lines of business, one is more B2C and one is B2B yet the type of service is related. To think of an example, let's say it's for a photographer who does weddings, but also does real estate photography. He wants to make sure he can market to each audience separately so when they go to his homepage the homepage content is oriented for the services that audience is looking for. If you use two separate websites, they have to be totally unique to avoid dupe content flags, and you also end up diluting each website's domain authority since you are spreading your inbound links between two different websites. However would this be the optimum strategy then? One website hosted on: bozophotography.com A second domain: bozoweddings.com that has a 301 redirect to the wedding section home page on bozophotography.com A third domain: bozorealestatephotos.com that has a 301 redirect to the real estate section home page. So on certain advertising, business cards, etc, the business could choose which domain they want to publicize to insure the audience sees a home page related to that line of business. I suppose you could publicize it as a subdomain like: realestate.bozophotography.com or as a slash address: bozophotography.com/weddings but those seem much less professional, visually, than just having bozoweddings.com. There is rumor you don't quite get 100% of the link juice, but the main domain would be used the majority of the time so I really see no downside?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jazee0 -
New domain or subdirectory?
I noticed my domain authority has dropped slightly in the recent update, and it has me re-thinking a strategy for a website I just recently launched. I purchased the domain name kansasisbeautiful.com about a year ago and have been working on building it for most of that time. Earlier in August, I went ahead and launched it. However, towards the end of the development of the website, I decided to just put it in a subdirectory of my parent company (my photography business) at mickeyshannon.com/kansas and redirected the kansasisbeautiful.com domain to the subdirectory. mickeyshannon.com is my photography business website. The Kansas website has it's own distinct design, but is powered completely by my photography. I created it for a few purposes, including promoting tourism to the state of Kansas and to publish a book on Kansas travel next year, but one of it's main goals is also to help sell my photography prints. I decided to put it in a subdirectory (mickeyshannon.com/kansas) as I had hoped it might drive more traffic into buying photo prints if it lived on my main website. However, I've been re-thinking my strategy and have been wondering if I'm competing against myself too much. Many of my photography prints have the name of a location in them and have their own URL per photo (for example: "Flint Hills Spring Sunrise" is at http://www.mickeyshannon.com/photo/flint-hills-spring-sunset/). It makes me wonder if the new Kansas travel website page for the Flint Hills (http://www.mickeyshannon.com/kansas/flint-hills/) is competing for that keyword. Would I be better moving mickeyshannon.com/kansas to kansasisbeautiful.com? I was worried having so many backlinks back to my photography site would send up red flags with Google as if the kansasisbeautiful.com website was just a spammy website created to push traffic to mickeyshannon.com when it really has it's own purpose. Any thoughts on whether using the domain name or keeping it at the subdomain level is better? Hopefully that made sense. Thanks, Mickey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VSphoto0 -
Domain Redirect and SSL Cert
Hi, When redirecting an entire site to another domain, do you have to maintain the SSL certificate? The SSL expires 3 days before the planned redirect. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sofla_seo0 -
301 Redirect from now defunct website?
Hi guys Quick question about 301 redirection between domains. I currently manage a website, lets call it website A. Website A sells a particular product range, however the decision has been made by the powers that be to pull the plug on the business and sell the products previously sold via Website A via another website within the parent companies control.....lets call it Website B. I need to make it clear to customers of Website A that the company no longer operates but want to pass the SEO equity that has been built up over time to the relevant pages on Website B. My plan was to 1. 301 Redirect all key landing pages on Website A to the most relevant pages on Website B 2. Initially keep the website A homepage live but change the message to say "Website A no longer operates, but Website B can help etc. etc." Remove all sub links from navigation. 3. Monitor referral and direct traffic levels and consider 301 redirecting website A homepage to Website B homepage in the long term. My questions: Does this sound like the best approach? If not, what alternatives are there? Will Website A look like a link farm for Website B? I dont want this obviously!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Do inbound links pass onto new domain if redirected?
If I set up a website on a new domain and have the old domain 301 redirected to the new domain, do the links pointing to the old site impact the new site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | priceseo0 -
How long should a domain redirect take?
Hi, I know that this is a 'How long is a piece of string?' type question but at what point should the ranking value of site A pass over to site B following a domain 301 redirect? I have shifted a domain over to a new URL, same hosting server, same IP address. I haven't made any URL changes or any content changes other than to change the site logo to match the new domain name. Domain B is basically an exact clone of domain A. I have redirected Domain A to domain B using the following line at the top of the .htaccess file:- Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/ I have submitted a sitemap for the new domain via google webmaster tools. It looks like the original domain as been completely indexed by google following the redirect as all rankings have been dropped from the results and there are no results for a site:olddomain.com search. Surely the rankings should have switched over at this point? Any help would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
Ade.0