Moving content
-
I have www.SiteA.com which contains a number of sections of content, a section of which (i.e. www.SiteA.com/sectionA), we would like to move to a new domain www.SiteB.com
Definitely we will ensure that a redirect strategy is in place and that we submit a sitemap for SiteB
Three Questions
1. Anything else I am missing from the migration plan?
2. Since we are only moving part of SiteA to SiteB, is there another way of telling Google that we changed address for that section or are the 301s enough?
3. Currently, Section A (under SiteA) contains a subsection where we were posting an article a day. In the new site (SiteB), we decided to drop this subsection and write content (but not "exactly" the same content) under a new section.
During migration, how should we handle the subsection that we have decided to stop writing?
Should we:
A. Import the content into SiteB and call it archives and then redirect all the urls from subsection under SiteA to the archives under SiteB?
OR
B. Do not move the content but redirect all the pages (365 in total) to where we think the user would be more interested in going to on SiteB?
Note: A colleague of mine is worried that since the subsection has good content he thinks its necessary to actually move the content to SiteB. But again, looking at the views for the archives it caters for 1% of the the total views of this section. In other words, people only view the article on the day it is written.
I hope I was clear
Your help is appreciated
Thank you
-
When moving content to a new site, I feel it is important to move as much as you can and leave little behind if you want all your pages to rank the same. The problem with moving pages and content is all the INTERNAL links, title tags, etc that make the website rank. It is much easier to delete pages after the whole website is moved. It very hard to put back all the Internal links and title tags. Yet these elements are critical to how people navigate your site and how google looks at the way you have supported the information on your website by linking to additional internal content relative to any particular page. In most cases if a website is ranking for multiple keywords in their business niche deleting any of the old pages, is just not necessary and may be harmful, until that page becomes a 'problem' to ranking, bad links to it, or simply not indexed anymore. Remember it is a counting game for most Internal links. So having 50 old pages linking to a new upper level and visible page, you want to rank, is very helpful. Even if the content is not something you want visitors to find, it is easy to leave the old content out of direct navigation on the new site so the only people that see it are from searches anyway and will be a small number of people. Everyone wants only high ranking pages, optimized to rank for particular keywords but that is rarely what happens. And google knows this, so having a mixture of poor pages and great pages actually will keep you from any negative points with google.
-
Thank you for your reply regarding (3).
So if
1. We think its of no more value to the visitor. (the unique views for the archives count for less than 1% of the viewed content)
2. It's time sensitive content i.e. content that is written about situations of the day
3. We have decided not to continue writing under this section any more on the new website
Do you think it still makes sense to import such content? My only problem is how google will perceive the fact that 360 pages will drop off from the current site it is on and not even be present on the new site.
This is tricky because really we are doing two things:
1. Migrating to a new domain a big part of a section from the current domain and 2. we are looking at how we can better streamline/improve content.
Maybe it just makes sense to import everything we have from the old domain and then after we successfully launch the new site, we look at how we can better streamline/improve content
-
301 redirects are the way to go.
It won't hurt to import the content if it is of value to the clients, the reality is you will 301 redirect each page-by-page so it would make sense to have the content from prior.
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
-
Tricky Duplicate Content Issue
Hi MOZ community, I'm hoping you guys can help me with this. Recently our site switched our landing pages to include a 180 item and 60 item version of each category page. They are creating duplicate content problems with the two examples below showing up as the two duplicates of the original page. http://www.uncommongoods.com/fun/wine-dine/beer-gifts?view=all&n=180&p=1 http://www.uncommongoods.com/fun/wine-dine/beer-gifts?view=all&n=60&p=1 The original page is http://www.uncommongoods.com/fun/wine-dine/beer-gifts I was just going to do a rel=canonical for these two 180 item and 60 item pages to the original landing page but then I remembered that some of these landing pages have page 1, page 2, page 3 ect. I told our tech department to use rel=next and rel=prev for those pages. Is there anything else I need to be aware of when I apply the canonical tag for the two duplicate versions if they also have page 2 and page 3 with rel=next and rel=prev? Thanks
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Home page duplicate content...
Hello all! I've just downloaded my first Moz crawl CSV and I noticed that the home page appears twice - one with an appending forward slash at the end: http://www.example.com
Technical SEO | | LiamMcArthur
http://www.example.com/ For any of my product and category pages that encounter this problem - it's automatically resolved with a canonical tag. Should I create the same canonical tag for my home page? rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" />0 -
Is the content on my website is garbage?
I received a mail from google webmasters, that my website is having low quality content. Website - nowwhatmoments.com
Technical SEO | | Green.landon0 -
Pages with content defined by querystring
I have a page that show traveltips: http://www.spies.dk/spanien/alcudia/rejsemalstips-liste This page shows all traveltips for Alcudia. Each traveltip also has its own url: http://www.spies.dk/spanien/alcudia/rejsemalstips?TravelTipsId=19767 ( 2 weeks ago i noticed the url http://www.spies.dk/spanien/alcudia/rejsemalstips show up in google webmaster tools as a 404 page, along with 100 of others urls to the subpage /rejsemalstips WITHOUT a querystring. With no querystring there is no content on the page and it goes 404. I need my technicians to redirect that page so it shows the list, but in the meantime i would like to block it in robots.txt But how do i block a page if it is called without a querystring?
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
Duplicate content due to csref
Hi, When i go trough my page, i can see that alot of my csref codes result in duplicate content, when SeoMoz run their analysis of my pages. Off course i get important knowledge through my csref codes, but im quite uncertain of how much it effects my SEO-results. Does anyone have any insights in this? Should i be more cautios to use csref-codes or dosent it create problems that are big enough for me to worry about them.
Technical SEO | | Petersen110 -
Problem with duplicate content
Hi, My problem is this: SEOmoz tells me I have duplicate content because it is picking up my index page in three different ways: http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/ and http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/index.php Can someone give me some advice as to how I can deal with this issue? thank you for your time, louandel15
Technical SEO | | louandel150 -
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 -
Solution for duplicate content not working
I'm getting a duplicate content error for: http://www.website.com http://www.website.com/default.htm I searched for the Q&A for the solution and found: Access the.htaccess file and add this line: redirect 301 /default.htm http://www.website.com I added the redirect to my .htaccess and then got the following error from Google when trying to access the http://www.website.com/default.htm page: "This webpage has a redirect loop
Technical SEO | | Joeuspe
The webpage at http://www.webpage.com/ has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer." "Error 310 (net::ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS): There were too many redirects." How can I correct this? Thanks0