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.
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.
-
You can do that. No problem. It will be best for wholesale customers.
My comments are designed to be best for retail rankings. If my connections to wholesale customers are poor then I would use your method. If my connections to wholesale customers are strong them I would do what's best for retail rankings. It is simply a matter of choice.
-
Your points about communicating as much as possible offline and by email, etc, are well taken.
I would still like to redirect existing wholesale pages to newwholesaledomain.com, primarily due to a desire to make everything as easy as we can for both types of customers. They want to emphasize the retail side but don't want to make it a pain for wholesale customers in the process.
So I'm inclined to redirect retail pages to newretaildomain.com and wholesale pages to newwholesaledomain.com. All page by page of course. Since the currentdomain.com home page will redirect to newretaildomain.com, we would put a notice on the new home page for our wholesale customers, pointing them to newwholesaledomain.com.
How does that sound? I think you are all correct that I should avoid redirect chains and meta refreshes.
-
I might also send out some... "Tell a Friend" email messages to past clients. They can then forward these to friends who may or may not have purchased in the past, but it will get them nice savings on their first purchase from your new domain.
I would make these offers so good that I don't make much money on them. This is just to get new people to the new domain. I would send them out in batches so my employees filling orders will not be so swamped that they will have trouble giving their normal fast service.
-
It would also be a good idea to plan and announce the move. This can be done by:
-
email and mail to important retail and wholesale clients.
-
before redirecting pages the old domain could include obvious messages to retail and wholesale clients, thanking them for their support, letting them know about the schedule of the move, and asking them to bookmark the new site.
-
inserts in retail shipments
-
special advertising before the move
-
special advertising and email after the move that gives old customers a nice discount when they make their first purchase on the new website.
-
-
Personally. I would not use metarefresh. I don't know how Google will treat it.
If I wanted to keep as much power as possible on the retail site I would have a plain page with my full internal navigation on it. It would also have a very clear message for wholesale visitors, that gives them as much time as they need to read, change their directories, and leave by their own action.
-
Interesting. At first I thought that it isn't a great experience for wholesale customers, but what if we added a meta refresh so that page has a message like... "The content you are looking for has moved. You will be redirected to the new location automatically in 5 seconds. Please bookmark the correct page at newwholesaledomain.com"
-
My first thought was exactly what EGOL suggested. However given the decission that they are dead set on rebranding I would suggest the following.
Split the wholesale site off first, leaving the current domain in place for a transitional period. After a pre-dertmined period of time (however long they feel it necessary for wholesale buyers to get used to the new website), then change the retail side to the new brand, and take full advatange of 301 and change of address.
My thoughts hope it helps,
Don
-
OK... thanks for the details.
In that case. I would build newretaildomain.com. Any pages that have equivalent or near-equivalent content on currentdomain.com would 301 direct page-by-page to newretaildomain.com.
All existing wholesale pages on currentdomain.com would 301 redirect to a new page on newretaildomain.com that explains your new wholesale website and has one outlink to newwholesaledomain.com. This page will keep all of the power of the wholesale pages on your new retail site, which must be competitive in the SERPs.
This maximizes power of newretaildomain.com and directs anyone who follows links to old pages on currentdomain.com to your new wholesale website.
This would be accompanied by multiple email and snail mail announcements to all wholesale clients. Sales agents would be trained how to transition.
-
I like this idea too
-
Thanks EGOL. Unfortunately they are committed to a full rebranding and want a new domain.
-
This is a great question and not easy. I would love to hear some others chime in. My guess is that splitting the pages immediately would be the best. Yes, you would lose the ability to do the change of address, but that really isn't essential. At the beginning, I would keep the content as similar as possible if not identical after the transfer (of course with different internal links).
-
If this was my biz and currentdomain.com is an appropriate domain for selling retail then I would start a brand new wholesale website and give it one link from the "about us" page on currentdomain.com. Any wholesale pages on current domain would redirect internally to the "about us" page. This keeps all of the power of currentdomain.com intact and does not divide it up.
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
-
Combining Two Sites With Similar Domain Authority
Hello, We run two sites with the same product, product descriptions and url structure. Essentially, the two sites are the same except for domain name and minor differences on the home pages. We've run this way for quite a few years. Both sites have a domain authority of 48 and there are not a large number of duplicate incoming links. I understand the "book" to say we should combine the sites with 301's to the similar pages. I am concerned about doing this because "site 2" still does about 20% of our business. We have been losing organic traffic for a number of years. I think this mainly has to do with a more competitive environment. However, where google used to serve both our sites for a search term it now will only show one. How much organic benefit should we see if we combine. Will it be significant enough to merge the two sites. Understandably, I realize the future can't be predicted but I would like to know if anyone has had a similar experience or opinion Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ffctas0 -
301 Redirecting from domain to subdomain
We're taking on a redesign of our corporate site on our main domain. We also have a number of well established, product based subdomains. There are a number of content pages that currently live on the corporate site that rank well, and bring in a great deal of traffic, though we are considering placing 301 redirects in place to point that traffic to the appropriate pages on the subdomains. If redirected correctly, can we expect the SEO value of the content pages currently living on the corporate site to transfer to the subdomains, or will we be negatively impacting our SEO by transferring this content from one domain to multiple subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com
I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gozmoz
Page Authority 40
Linking Root Domains 31
External Link Count 138
Internal Link Count 18
Status Code 200
1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
Page Authority 19
Linking Root Domains 1
External Link Count 0
Internal Link Count 15
Status Code 200
1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
or
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks0 -
Combining two existing sites into a single magento install
Hi, We run an online beauty ecommerce store and recently acquired one of our competitors. Their site runs on magento also, and they sell 70% the same product as us. We plan to merge the new site into our existing magento install but keep both sites looking exactly as they do now with different themes, different product names, product descriptions, product prices, category structures etc. In theory the customer would have no idea both sites from the same magento, they will look just as they do now. My question is, will google possibly slap the SERP's of either sites because we have combined them onto the same server and same magento install, even though nothing on either site actually changed on the front end. Both sites already have the same ownership information on the domain WHOIS, and a quick company search would reveal that we legally own both businesses under the same company. So it's not something we are trying to hide, we are open about it, and plan to continue running both sites long term, with each site being targeted to a slightly difference audience, with 30% different products at different price points. Has anyone done this before? Was there any SEO risks or SERP drops? Would love some advice on this matter before we make the move, the possible blow back is way too massive to do it without firm advice saying the risk is very low. Brad.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rec1230 -
Two Different Domains exact same content
Hello, I suspect I know the answer to this but would like to have it confirmed. I have been speaking to a company the last couple of weeks who have 2 domains with the exact same content. Possible a third but they haven't supplied a link. This from all I've read would be a huge problem for ranking and SEO. What would be the best way to deal with this ? I did do a search and found articles/questions on same content on the same site and in articles etc but nothing about exactly the same websites on 2 domains. Cheers David.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | techdesign0 -
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
301 redirect subdirectory to new domain
I'm planning on using 301 redirects to spin out a subdirectory of my current website to be its own separate domain. For instance, I currently have a website www.website.com and my writers write tech news at www.website.com/news. Now I want to 301 redirect www.website.com/news to www.technews.com. Will this have any negative impact on SEO? What are some steps that I can take to minimize these impacts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris_Bishop1 -
Unique domains vs. single domain for UGC sites?
Working on a client project - a UGC community that has a DTC model as well as a white label model. Is it categorically better to have them all under the same domain? Trying to figure which is better: XXX,XXX pages on one site vs. A smaller XXX,XXX pages on one site and XX,XXX pages on 10-20 other sites all pointing to the primary site. The thinking on the second was that those domains would likely achieve high DA as well as the primary, and would passing their value to the primary. Thoughts? Any other considerations we should be thinking about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intentionally0