Temporary Duplicate Sites - Do anything?
-
Hi Mozzers -
We are about to move one of our sites to Joomla. This is one of our main sites and it receives about 40 million visits a month, so the dev team is a little concerned about how the new site will handle the load.
Dev's solution, since we control about 2/3 of that traffic through our own internal email and cross promotions, is to launch the new site and not take down the old site. They would leave the old site on its current URL and make the new site something like new.sub.site.com. Traffic we control would continue to the old site, traffic that we detect as new would be re-directed to the new site. Over time (the think about 3-4 months) they would shift the traffic all to the new site, then eventually change the URL of the new site to be the URL of the old site and be done.
So this seems to be at the outset a duplicate content (whole site) issue to start with. I think the best course of action is try to preserve all SEO value on the old URL since the new URL will eventually go away and become the old URL. I could consider on the new site no-crawl/no-index tags temporarily while both sites exist, but would that be risky since that site will eventually need to take those tags off and become the only site? Rel=canonical temporarily from the new site to the old site also seems like it might not be the best answer.
Any thoughts?
-
I'm going to throw in a completely different option, because in my opinion, messing with this kind of multiple version situation is going to put your huge website at massive risk of screwed up rankings and lost traffic no matter how tricky you get.
First, I'm assuming that significant high-level load testing has been done on the dev site already. If not, that's the place to start. (I'm suspecting a Joomla site for 40 million visits a month will have lots of load-balancing in place?)
Since by all indications, the sites will be identical to the visitor, I'd suggest switching to the new site, but keeping the original site immediately available in near-line status. By setting the TTL of the DNS to a very short duration while in transition, the site could be switched back to the old version within a minute or two just by updating the DNS if something goes pear-shaped on the new site.
Then, while the old site continues to serve visitors as it always has, devs can fix whatever issue was discovered on the new site.
This would mean keeping both sites' content updated concurrently during the period of the changeover, but it sounds like you were going to have to do that anyway. There's also the small risk that some visitors would have cached DNS on their own computers and so might still get sent to the new site for a while even after the DNS had been set back to the old site, but I'd say that's a vastly smaller risk than screwing up the rankings of the whole site.
Bottom line, there are plenty of load testing/quality assurance/server over-provisioning methods for making virtually certain the new site will be able to perform before going live. Having the backup site should be a very short term insurance, rather than a long term duplication process.
That's my perspective, anyway, having done a number of large-site migrations (though certainly nothing approaching 40M visits/month)
Paul
Just for refernce, I was involved in helping after just such a major migration where the multiple sites did get indexed. It took nearly a year to rectify the situation and get the rankings/traffic/usability back in order
-
Arghhh... This sounds like a crazy situation.
If the temp site is on a temporary subdomain, you definitely don't want any of those pages seeping into the index. But 3-4 months seems like an incredibly long time to sustain this. 3-4 days seems more reasonable to handle load testing.
For example, what happens when someone links to one of the temporary pages? Unless you put a rel canonical on the page, and allow robots to crawl it, then you won't gain from that link equity.
For a shorter time period, I'd simple block all crawlers via robots.txt, add a meta "noindex, nofollow" tag to the header, and hope for the best.
But for 3-4 months, you're taking the chance of sending very confusing signals to search engines, or losing out on new link equity. You could still use the meta "noindex, nofollow" on the temp domain if you need to, and also include rel=canonical tags (these are separate directives and actually processed differently) but there's no gaurentee of a smooth transistion once you ditch the temp urls.
So... my best advice is to convince your dev team to shorten the 3-4 month time frame. Not an easy job.
-
Wow 40 million visitors a month is no joke and nothing to be taken lightly if not done right the loss of traffic could be huge.
The new site should be non indexable and you can redirect a percentage of traffic to the new site (beta.site.com) for server load testing reasons and once you determine it is stable you can move it over to the new site.
Are URLs and site structure etc remaining the same? I wouldn't change too much at once or you won't know what happened if something tanks.
-
Thanks for the response.
It might have been just an unfounded concern, based on a vague memory of something I read about rel=canonical on here, but cannot find it now.
I was just concerned that if you have site A and B and rel=canonical from B to A, then eventually get rid of A and have B take on the URL of A, that the engines might interpret this oddly and have it affect domain authority.
-
Why do you think that canonical tags won't work?
That's what I would suggest.. Those tags simply tell Google which is the authoritative site of the duplicates. If you are preserving the original domain, canonical to that one and when you make the switch nothing will change. Do keep in mind if any of your directories or file structures are altered you will want to put in redirects but it sounds like your web team knows what they're doing here.
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
-
Google Indexed Site A's Content On Site B, Site C etc
Hi All, I have an issue where the content (pages and images) of Site A (www.ericreynolds.photography) are showing up in Google under different domains Site B (www.fastphonerepair.com), Site C (www.quarryhillvet.com), Site D (www.spacasey.com). I believe this happened because I installed an SSL cert on Site A but didn't have the default SSL domain set on the server. You were able to access Site B and any page from Site A and it would pull up properly. I have since fixed that SSL issue and am now doing a 301 redirect from Sites B, C and D to Site A for anything https since Sites B, C, D are not using an SSL cert. My question is, how can I trigger google to re-index all of the sites to remove the wrong listings in the index. I have a screen shot attached so you can see the issue clearer. I have resubmitted my site map but I'm not seeing much of a change in the index for my site. Any help on what I could do would be great. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cwscontent
Eric TeVM49b.png qPtXvME.png1 -
Is my site being penalized?
I've gone through all the points on https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 but the site only ranks for its brand name after months. The website is not ranking in the top 100 for any main keywords (2,3,4 word phrases), only for a handful of very long phrases (4+). All of the content is unique, all pages are indexed, the website is fast and doesn't contain any crawl errors and there are a couple of links pointing to it. There is a sitewide follow link in the footer pointing to another domain, its parent company and vice-versa. This is not done for any SEO reasons but the companies are related and also the products are supplementary of each other. Could this be an issue? Or is my site being penalized by something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robbern0 -
What makes a site appear in Google Alerts? And does it mean anything?
Hi All, I recently started using Google Alerts more and more and while sites I support never appear there (not surprising) I recently noticed few very poor and low quality sites that do. This site for example appears quite a bit in its niche. So to my questions... What makes a site appear in Google Alerts? And does it mean anything? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Troubled QA Platform - Site Map vs Site Structure
I'm running a Q&A forum that was built prioritizing UX over SEO. This decision has cause a bit of a headache as we're 6 months into the project with 2278 Q&A pages with extremely minimal traffic coming from search engines. The structure has the following hiccups: A. The category navigation from the main Q&A page is entirely javascript and only navigable by users. B. We identify Google bots and send them to another version of the Q&A platform w/o javascript. Category links don't exist in this google bot version of the main Q&A page. On this Google version of the main Q&A page, the Pinterest-like tiles displaying individual Q&As are capped at 10. This means that the only way google bot can identify link juice being passed down to individual QAs (after we've directed them to this page) is through 10 random Q&As. C. All 2278 of the QAs are currently indexed in search. They are just indexed very very poorly in SERPs. My personal assumption, is that Google can't pass link juice to any of the Q&As (poor SERP) but registers them from the site map so it gets included in Google's index. My dilemma has me struggling between two different decisions: 1. Update the navigation in the header to remove the javascript and fundamentally change the look and feel of the Q&A platform. This will allow Google bot to navigate through Expert category links to pass link juice to all Q&As. or 2. Update the redirected main Q&A page to include hard coded category links with 100s of hard coded Q&As under each category page. Make it similar, ugly, flat and efficient for the crawling bots. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I need to find a solution as soon as possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TQContent0 -
What constitutes a duplicate page?
Hi, I have a question about duplicate page content and wondered if someone is able to shed some light on what actually constitutes a "duplicate". We publish hundreds of bus timetable pages that have similar, but technically with unique urls and content. For example http://www.intercity.co.nz/travel-info/timetable/lookup/akl The template of the page is oblivious duplicated, but the vast majority of the content is unique to each page, with data being refreshed each night. Our crawl shows these as duplicate page errors, but is this just a generalisation because the urls are very similar? (only the last three characters change for each page - in this case /akl) Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BusBoyNZ0 -
Can this site be optimised?
I have been told that because of the technology this site was developed with it cannot be changed for example urls title and meta tags cannot be changed. why is that and what other types of sites also cannot be changed. http://www.alliedpickfords.com/Pages/Landing.aspx For example i have been told alot of online stores cannot be optimised because the urls change every time some one goes to the page therefor you cant lionk to a certain page is that true and what is the way around it if any.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | duncan2740 -
Building a mobile site.
We are building a mobile site that will be launching in another month. I’m concerned that the mobile site will start catabolizing our traditional rankings. Is there a way to keep this from happening? Should we utilize the cross domain canonical tag and point back to the traditional site URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO-Team0 -
Duplicate page Content
There has been over 300 pages on our clients site with duplicate page content. Before we embark on a programming solution to this with canonical tags, our developers are requesting the list of originating sites/links/sources for these odd URLs. How can we find a list of the originating URLs? If you we can provide a list of originating sources, that would be helpful. For example, our the following pages are showing (as a sample) as duplicate content: www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=11 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=12 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=15 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=2 "How did you get all those duplicate urls? I have tried to google the "contact us", "news", "video" pages. I didn't get all those duplicate pages. The page id=87 on the most of the duplicate pages are not supposed to be there. I was wondering how the visitors got to all those duplicate pages. Please advise." Note, the CMS does not create this type of hybrid URLs. We are as curious as you as to where/why/how these are being created. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dlemieux0