Moving Duplicate Sites
-
Apologies in advance for the complexity.
My client, company A, has purchased company B in the same industry, with A and B having separate domains. Current hosting arrangement combines registrar and hosting functions in 1 account so as to allow both domains to point to a common folder, with the result that identical content is displayed for both A & B. The current site is kind of an amalgam of A and B.
Company A has decided to rebrand and completely absorb company B. The problem is that link value overwhelmingly favours B over A.
The current (only) hosting package is Windows, and I am creating a new site and moving them to Linux with another hosting company. I can use 301's for A , but not for B as it is a separate domain and currently shares a hosting package with A.
How can I best preserve the link juice that domain B has? The only conclusion I can come up with is to set up separate Linux hosting for B which will allow for the use of 301's.
Does anyone have a better idea?
-
A pleasure Wayne! (If you get stuck with the web hosting issue I'm sure we can arrange a whip round for you! ;o)
-
Blimey! How tight are her purse strings ;o)
As you could get away with next to no space for this if you are happy to redirect using just a .htaccess file you are going to need a very small hosting package if you chose that method.
I think I would specifically request it by email and explain why it is required and the detriment of NOT having it and ask her in the email if she can approve the purchase - essentially make her say 'YES, not problem' (and get the problem sorted quickly) or 'NO, not happening' (and leave the ball in her court - when people kick off in the top offices!)
If you are tasked to do a job (and expected to do it well!) then you can't be denied the tools you need to carry out the task - without someone else putting their neck on the block (in writing!)
-
Thanks to both of you, as this validates my logic.
-
Nothing preventing me per se, but in spite of this being a reasonably sized company, I deal with a marketing manager who doesn't understand the importance here. My real challenge here will be to convince her that it's important enough to set up another hosting account
-
If there anything preventing you from moving site B into an environment where you can control it and 301 ing it from there?
EDIT: Ahh, it looks like you consider that as your best option currently - based on the comments right at the end of your post?
Migrating Site B into an environment you can control as you wish makes perfect sense to me and create all the 301s to your new Site A when migration is complete - you should be able to do this pretty seamlessly - as you don't need to worry about the bulk of the site itself - just a change of nameserver and point it to a server that contains your already mapped out 301'd .htaccess file?
-
The problem is that link value overwhelmingly favours B over A.
Looks like you have a great opportunity to increase the rankings of A.
I have done this using the same method that you described. We did a page-by-page 301 redirect of B to A - but all was on my own server that allowed multiple accounts - so no added cost.
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
-
Duplicate Version of My Website
Hello Again, Looking for a little help to help me understand what exactly is going on here. Ive taken over maintenance of a website and have so far fixed a lot of issues. ahrefs has shown me that a second version of my companies website exists that exists at a second url. This second website is linked to the actual company website like I haven't seen before. www(dot)#(dot)co(dot)uk is the main company website. But a second accessible version exists and is accessible at www(dot)#(dot)co(dot)uk The instruments version is a direct copy and all of the links point directly to my main site. Any changes I make on the main version are automatically applied to the other version. It shows up as a SPAM back link on moz as all of the link points to my website etc Ideally in my mind, the instruments version homepage should simply re-direct to the main homepage to solve this "duplicate content and spammy backlink" issue however, the instruments version is the same suffix that all our company emails work with. Basically, HELP lol. I have no understanding of how this is set up, and the best way in which to deal and if it could affect anything such as company emails.
Technical SEO | | ATP0 -
Avoiding duplication in TLDs
I have started a ecom site with following config global version geekwik.com priced in usd india version geekwik.in priced in inr mostly the content in both sites is same (90% same), major difference is currency (and payment gateway) and helpline numbers etc How do I setup robots.txt and google webmaster so that indian users get results from India TLD and global users get results from global TLD and there is no duplication of content. .
Technical SEO | | geekwik0 -
How to avoid duplicate content penalty when our content is posted on other sites too ?
For recruitment company sites, their job ads are posted muliple times on thier own sites and even on other sites too. These are the same ads (job description is same) posted on diff. sites. How do we avoid duplicate content penalty in this case?
Technical SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Merged old wordpress site to new theme and have crazy amount of 4xx and duplicate content that wasn't there before?
URL is awardrealty.com We have a new website that we merged into a new wordpress theme. I just crawled the site with my seomoz crawl tool and it is showing a ridiculous amount of 4xx pages (200+) and we cant find the 4xx pages in the sitemap or within wordpress. Need some help? Am i missing something easy?
Technical SEO | | Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.0 -
Duplicate Content
Many of the pages on my site are similar in structure/content but not exactly the same. What amount of content should be unique for Google to not consider it duplicate? If it is something like 50% unique would it be preferable to choose one page as the canonical instead of keeping them both as separate pages?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Duplicate content
I have just ran a report in seomoz on my domain and has noticed that there are duplicate content issues, the issues are: www.domainname/directory-name/ www.domainname/directory-name/index.php All my internal links and external links point to the first domain, as i prefer this style as it looks clear & concise, however doing this has created duplicate content as within the site itself i have an index.php page inside this /directory-name/ to show the page. Could anyone give me some advice on what i should do please? Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
Duplicate Content
Hi - We are due to launch a .com version of our site, with the ability to put prices into local currency, whereas our .co.uk site will be solely £. If the content on both the .com and .co.uk sites is the same (at product level mainly), will we be penalised? What is the best way to get around this?
Technical SEO | | swgolf1230 -
About duplicate content
Hi i'm a new guy around here, but i'm having this problem in my website. Using de Seomoz tools i ran a camping to my website, in results i get to many errors for duplicate conten, for example, http://www.mysite/blue/ http://www.mysite/blue/index.html, so my question is, what is the best way to resolve this problem, use a 301 or use the rel canonical tag? Wich url will be consider for main url, Thanks for yor help.
Technical SEO | | NorbertoMM0