Site Migration Question
-
Hi Guys,
I am preparing for a pretty standard site migration. Small business website moving to a new domain, new branding and new cms.
Pretty much a perfect storm.
Right now the new website is being designed and will need another month, however the client is pretty antsy to get her new brand out over the web. We cannot change the current site, which has the old branding.
She wants to start passing out business cards and hang banners with the new domain and brand. However, I don't want to be messing with any redirects and potentially screw up a clean migration from the old site to the new. To be specific, she wants to redirect the new domain to the current domain and then when the new site, flip the redirect.
However, I'm a little apprehensive with that because a site migration from the current to the new is already so intricate, I don't want to leave any possibility of error.
I'm trying to figure out the best solution, these are 2 options I am thinking of:
- DO NOT market new domain. Reprint all Marketing material and wait until new domain is up and then start marketing it. (At cost to client)
- Create a one pager on new domain saying the site is being built & have a No Follow link to the current site. No redirects added. Just the no follow link.
I'd like option 2 so that the client could start passing out material, but my number one concern is messing with any part of the migration.
We are about to submit a sitemap index to Google Search Console for the current site, so we are just starting the site migration.
What do you guys think?
-
You helped validate my thoughts. Yeah, the reason I am taking this so seriously is because we are taking so much time to map out the old domain and the pages to their corresponding new pages, that I don't want something like this to ruin it.
The client ended up saying that they don't mind reprinting a handful of business cards to reflect the old domain and then use the new cards when the new site is up. Either way, I think both options are doable.
Thanks mememax! Appreciate it.
-
I imagine there is no way to show the new design and layout on the old domain.
If that's the case I find option #2 to be the best. You are showing the new website while keeping the areas you're developing closed, and without any redirects. It's critical that you place redirect from old to new website after everything is ready so you can make a page by page or section by sections redirect and not send everything to the homepage.
I understand that clients sometimes wants to move forward but it's better to make things right. You're still providing hiim/her and option to start marketing it, although I still think it's not a good idea as people will see a work in progress website. Ensure to explain all the drawbacks on moving on early as you may be wasting a good marketing opportunity.
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
-
Mobile First Index: What Could Happen To Sites w Large Desktop but Small Mobile Sites?
I have a question about how Mobile First could affect websites with separate (and smaller) mobile vs desktop sites. Referencing this SE Roundtable article (seorountable dot com /google-mobile-first-index-22953.html), "If you have less content on your mobile version than on your desktop version - Google will probably see the less content mobile version. Google said they are indexing the mobile version first." But Google/ Gary Illyes are also on the record stating the switch to mobile-first should be minimally disruptive. Does "Mobile First" mean that they'll consider desktop URLs "second", or will they actually just completely discount the desktop site in lieu of the mobile one? In other words: will content on your desktop site that does not appear in mobile count in desktop searches? I can't find clear answer anywhere (see also: /jlh-marketing dot com/mobile-first-unanswered-questions/). Obviously the writing is on the wall (and has been for years) that responsive is the way to go moving forward - but just looking for any other viewpoints/feedback here since it can be really expensive for some people to upgrade. I'm basically torn between "okay we gotta upgrade to responsive now" and "well, this may not be as critical as it seems". Sigh... Thanks in advance for any feedback and thoughts. LOL - I selected "there may not be a right answer to this question" when submitting this to the Moz community. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mirabile0 -
Open Site Explorer - Spam analysis: need help with inbound links... from my site!
hallo, reading my spam analysis report from open explorer, I found somenthing I don't understand (please see attached image): The long list of links inside the red rectangle are inbound links with a spam score of 5 coming from my same site. How is that possible? Should I remove those links? Also , I see that many of those links are links present in the top navigation bar (about page, home page, service description etc.) or in the sidebar section of the website (categories, recent posts, recent comments). Should I treat them differently? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micvitale0 -
Linking from a corporate site to a brand site.
Is there an SEO impact to a large corporation linking from a corporate and/or a divisional site to a specific brand site with it's own top level domain? We would like to keep the traffic coming, but not if it will be seen as a black hat tactic. My guess is that Google will be smart enough to see that the corporation owns the brand and at least not penalize us, but I am wondering if anyone else has this experience? Google Analytics is calling it self-referral.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrbobland0 -
Penguin recovery, no manual action. Are our EMD sites killing our brand site?
Hi guys, Our brand site (http://urban3d.net) has been seeing steady decline due to algorithm updates for the past two years. Our previous SEO company engaged in some black-hat link building which has hurt us very badly. We have recently re-launched the site, with better design, better content, and completed a disavow of hundreds of bad links. The site is technically indexed, but is still nowhere in the SERPs after months of work to recover it by our internal marketing team. The last SEO company also told us to build EMD sites for our core services, which we did: http://3dvisualisation.co.uk/ http://propertybrochure.com/ http://kitchencgi.com/ My question is - could these EMD sites now hurting us even further and stopping our main brand site from ranking? Our plan is to rescue our brand site, with a view to retiring these outlier sites. However, with no progress on the brand site, we can't afford to remove these site (which are ranking). It seems a bit chicken and egg. Any advice would be very much appreciated. Aidan, Urban 3D
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aidancass0 -
Internal links question
I've read that Google frowns upon large numbers of internal links. We're building a site that helps users browse a list of shows via dozens of genres. If the genres are expose, say, as a pulldown menu as opposed to a list of static links, and selecting the pulldown option filters the list of shows, would those genres count against our internal links count?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
1 Ecommerce site for several product segments or 1 Ecommerce site for each product segment ?
I am currently struggling with the decision whether to create individual ecommerce sites for each of 3 consumer product segments or rather to integrate them all under one umbrella domain. Obviously integration under 1 domain makes link building easier, but I am not sure how far google will favor in rankings websites focussed on one topic=product segment. Product segments are medium competitive.Product segments are not directly related but there may be some overlap in customer demographics- Any thoughts ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse1 -
Site dancing
Hi guys I have a site which is dancing. I mean one day is on position 20 , if I put more backlinks is falling, after rising again,, I dont know what is going on. The site is 2 years old, pr 2, authority 35. Why this is happening? Usually when he appears again is ranking higher, but today he disappear totally from rankings. Maybe return tomorrow? But anyway why is dancing? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Multiple sites in the same niche
Hi All A question regarding multiple sites in the same niche... If I have say 10 sites all targetting the same niche yet all on different C-class IPs with different hosts, registrars, whois data and ages can I use the same template, or will Google discern a pattern? Basically I have developed a WordPress template which I want to use on the sites albeit with different logos / brand colours. NB/ All of the 10 sites will have unique, original content and they will NOT be interlinked
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielparry1