Moving low ranking domain
-
I have a website, that I rewrote great content for, but I recently found that there are many, many links going to the subdomain that may be pulling it down.
Has anyone had experience taking down a site and then moving the content to a new site? Will it be considered duplicate content if you completely take the old site down and use rel="canonical" on new site pages?
I don't want to lose the good content, but I cannot have it on the current URL with all the bad backlinking (it's a complicated situation, as I need to keep those backlinks which are affiliates).
Thank you.
-
Agree with John. I would also not 301 the old URLs to the new. All that would do is pass the negative link equity from the old site to the new and you are right back where you started.
Kill the old site with a 410, or even better, you can go into GWT and verify yourself for that sub domain. Then you can put in a request to have that entire subdomain removed from Google. You then put up a robot.txt and it is gone. This will also prevent the old site from being found again by Google for all the links.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663427?hl=en
We use load balancers on our servers and once had a subdomain www1 that got indexed and there were even some FB shares etc. We ended up going this route to get it out and keep it out of the index.
-
Hey Rox -
Great question here. I'm going to try to give an answer, but I'm also going to put in a few questions to help clarify things.
First, I doubt that the subdomain is pulling down the www. if the subdomain has a lot of bad links to it. This is assuming it's example.domain.com and not the www.domain.com in itself (www is techincally a subdomain).
If you want to move the content from the subdomain, why not move it to the main domain and not 301 the old URLs? Instead, add the new URLs to the XML sitemap and link to them internally. Then, put either a 404 or 410 status code on the old pages so that they drop out of the index and the links are not affecting your site anymore.
If you do want to move the content to another site, but you think you have either an algorithmic or manual penalty, do not 301 the old URLs to the new domain. Instead, go about building up that site like you would any new site.
I hope this helps.
John
-
Hi RoxBrock,
I'll try to clarify a few points for you:
1 - It can't possibly be duplicate content if you take the old site down. Only if you create a new site with identical content and keep the old one there too.
2 - You can't use rel="canonical" on pages you are deleting (assuming you remove the old site). Instead, you should look to create 301 redirects
Be careful redirecting the old pages to the new URL, since you might inadvertently penalise the new URL. A better tactic might be to try to remove the old 'bad' links and then take stock from there?
Hope that helps!
-
Hi Roxbrock, can you pm me your example?
Thanks,
Todd
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
-
Ranking fluctuation
Has anybody got any ideas? I have a website that ranks quite well for an industry keyword, the site has a reasonable amount of authority. But the term is fluctuating between position 3 and position 9! It is on a beefy stable server. It is reasonably well optimised from both SEO and speed point of view. It is tracked using Moz RankTracker. I do realise that rankings fluctuate, but this is ridiculous!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
Ranking after redirecting two URLs to a new domain
I run two websites which operate in similar business sectors. Each has a calculator tool that offers the same functionality. The pages rank 2nd and 5th for the key search term. I'd like to improve the functionality of this and have thought about setting up a new domain for this calculator to move it away from the main sites. If I did this and 301 redirected both pages to the new domain do you think I'd maintain a strong ranking position for this search term on the new domain? Thanks for any advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | craigramsay0 -
Rankings drastically changing
I monitor our positions for a few keywords but they are very unstable. One day they will be at position 1, 2 or 3 and then all of a sudden not even on Google. We use an IP redirect to guide users to the correct site and I suspect this may be a cause. Could anybody shed some light? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanRowlands0 -
Low on Google ranking despite error-free!?
Hi all, I'm following up on a recent post i've made about our indexing and especially ranking problems in Google: http://moz.com/community/q/seo-impact-classifieds-website Thanks to all good comments we managed to get rid of most of our crawl errors and as a result our high priority /duplicated content decreased from +22k to 270. In short, we created canonical urls, run an xml sitemap, used url parameters in GWT, created h1 and meta description for each ad posted by users etc. I then used google fetch a few times (3 weeks ago and last week) both for desktop and mobile version for re-approval. Nothing really improves in google rankings (all our core keywords are ranked +50)since months now: yet yahoo and bing organic traffic went up and is 3x higher than google's. In the meanwhile we're running paid campagins on facebook and adwords since months already to keep traffic consistent, yet this is eating up our budget, even though our ctr and conversion rates are good. I realize we might have to create more content on-site and through social media, but right now our social media traffic is already around 50% and we are using more of twitter and google+ as well since recently. Our organic traffic is only 14%; with google only a third of that. In the end, I believe this breakdown should look more something like organic 50%-70%, (paid)social,referral and direct traffic. 50%-30%... I can't believe we are hit by a penalty although this looks like it is the case. Especially while yahoo and bing traffic goes up and google does not. Should I wait for a signal once our site is "approved" again through GWT fetch? Or am i missing something that i need to check as well to improve these rankings? Thanks for your help! Ivor ps: ask me for additional stats or info in a pm if needed!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ivordg0 -
Penguin hit Website - Moving to new domain
Hey! I am working on a Penguin hit Website. Still ranking for all brand keywords and blog articles are still being returned in Google SERPs, but the website is showing up for only 3 or 4 money keywords. It is clearly a penguin hit as it was ranked 1st page for all money keywords before latest update (3.0). We already did a link cleanup and disavowed all bad backlinks. Still, the recovery process could take over 2 years from previous experience, and in 2 years, the site will suffer a slow death. Solution: We own the .com version of the domain, currently being served on the .net. We bought the .com version about 6 years ago, it is clean and NOT redirected to the .net (actual site). We were thinking about moving the whole Website to the .com version to start over. However, we need to make sure Google doesn't connect the 2 sites (no pagerank flow). Of course Google will notice is the same content, but there won't be any pagerank flowing from the old site to the new one. For this, we thought about the following steps: Block Googlebot (and only googlebot) for the .net version via robots.txt. Wait until Google removes all URLs from the index. Move content to the .com version. Set a 301 redirect from .net to .com (without EVER removing the block on googlebot). Thoughts? Has anyone went over this before? Other ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FedeEinhorn0 -
Is it safe to redirect our .nl (netherlands) domain that we have just purchased to our .com domain?
Hi all! We've recently developed a German version of our website with German translation and now we have just purchased a .nl domain, but with this one, we want all of the copy to remain in English. Is it ok to redirect our .nl domain to our current .com website or will this give us bad SEO points? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donaldsze0 -
301 redirect from one domain to other domain, How To?
Hi, I need to redirect 150 products pages from http://www.filtrationmontreal.com/ to http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/ How can I do this? Is there a tool or anything I can do to do 301 from one domain to another one? Can I use Google Webmaster Tool? Thank you, BigBlaze
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
My site rank is not consistent. Once it at first page , then for the next week it is not found in top 100 position. Again two/ three weeks later it ranked automatically without any work. Why this is happening?
Here's the following are available in my site: robot.txt file is included sitemap available Natural link building going on. in a week total 100 links we are creating. 30 social bookmarks, 30 directory submission, 20 blog comments, 20 forum links All the blog and forum links are from relevant sources. Please help me ..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | coldfireinc0