Migration Strategy
-
Hi guys,
Just want to check on this site migration strategy. Basically we have an Australian based ecommerce site which is going to launch globally.
The company has two site. One is (http://www.domainUS.com – for US market) and one is Australian based (http://www.domain.com.au).
Basically the plan is to have one single global .com site (like ASOS.com) on a new domain which would be domain.com and put both the current http://www.domainUS.com (US VERSION) and http://www.domain.com.au (AUSTRALIAN VERSION) on the new domain: domain.com (global)
To make it even more complicated the new global domain (domain.com) is in the process of being purchased (someone else has the domain) and won’t be available till January 2016. But the company wants to execute the new global setup in November 2015 temporary on the .com.au version
The current migration plan is to create two different sub-folders one for US e.g. http:www.domain.com.au/us and one for AUD http://www.domain.com/au on the current domain Australian domain.com.au for the global launch in November 2015. Then once domain.com is ready in January 2016, then migrate to domain.com with the countries as sub-folder (as shown below in stage 3).
I was wondering if you guys think this would be an ideal migration strategy given the circumstances.
Link to screenshot of current migration strategy:
http://c714091.r91.cf2.rackcdn.com/4c2aae21dcbd548f27d96840227b81bc6b8b00c592.png
Any advice would be very much appreciated!
Cheers, Chris
-
This temporary set-up idea makes little sense to me... migrations are tough enough anyway, and the temporary middle stage is increasing both risk and complexity.
-
You definitely won't lose as much value with this strategy. It's a good stop-gap in a difficult situation.
-
Hi Matt,
Thanks for your answer!
Good tip on the 302s. Yeah definitely isn't ideal.
Currently the Australian site is the one with most of the domain authority and organic traffic. I'm also thinking at this possibly:
http://c714091.r91.cf2.rackcdn.com/4c2aae21dc8c159b81caae827029d8a1bbf57c90ed.png
So just leave the Australian site for now, the developers will have to simply deal with this on there end.
And the US site do the temporary 302 then change to 301 once the global site is ready.
What do you think of this instead?
-
This is pretty much complicated so let me summarize what you are up to and then will move towards my suggestion.
You have 2 domains at the moment, one targets US and the other target AU market. Now you are planning a global launch on a third domain where most probably you are going to redirect your existing pages.
The global domain is not with you so you want to go with a temporary strategy and that is to create a sub folder. US sub folder on AU website and AU sub-folder on a US website.
--
WOW, saying that this strategy is ideal for one or not will be difficult as there are lot of things missing which includes brand reputation, market share, audience trust on the brand and more.
I mean if you can wait for few months than going for a new domain is a better idea than going for a temporary strategy as this will be a very quick change for audience, first in November and another change in January.
Try to give the amount of time to audience in which they can adjust. Again, if the audience’s trust level with the brand is good and they can accept this kind of quick change then I don’t see a problem.
I am assuming that on sub folders you will link to another website instead of creating a new content on a sub folder. I believe create separate content on a sub folder is not a good idea as SEO issues and ranking will take months and within few months you have to move to another strategy.
I don’t see a problem with moving to a new domain but you have to keep in mind that when shifting two different website to a 3<sup>rd</sup> domain you will see lot of ranking fluctuation so if you have a good migration plan but no back up plan then you should consider having one right now or else you will see a big loss from the organic traffic.
Again, there are lot of points that can be discussed but this is what I think it is having the limited knowledge about the domains and business.
Hope this helps!
-
Do the two current sites (domainUS.com and domain.com.au) have a lot of authority?
The final location for these, in 2 subfolders, is ideal. I like where you're going with this. But the plan to jump to the .com.au/us and /au is ... well, sub-optimal. It's not ideal to have two sets of redirects essentially to solve a 2 month problem.
If the current sites aren't very authoritative, you'll probably be ok. If they have a decent amount of ranking power & current traffic, I would try to skip the middle step or at least use 302 instead of 301 redirects. Using the 302s mean the .com.au/us and .com.au/au sites won't get the value of the current sites for Nov/Dec/Jan but it does mean you're not going to chain 301s once January comes. You'll just remove the 302s and create 301s to the new domain.com/us and domain.com/au websites.
Those 301s will then pick up the majority of the current ranking power and give you the best possible boost.
If you can't hold off until the company owns the .com, that's what I would do at least.
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
-
How do I treat URLs with bookmarks when migrating a site?
I'm migrating an old website into a new one, and have several pages that have bookmarks on them. Do I need to redirect those? or how should they be treated? For example, both https://www.tnscanada.ca/our-expertise.html and https://www.tnscanada.ca/our-expertise.html#auto resolve .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NatalieB_Kantar0 -
Ecommerce Migration - Criteria To Redirecting Products
Hi Guys, We have an e-commerce migration of a site moving from Magento to Shopify. The URL stuctures are changing so we will need redirects in place. They have over 50,000 skus/products. We need to setup redirect mapping - from old to new pages. Now setting up redirects for every single product seems overtop. Thus what is a good minimum requirement to determine if its worth redirecting a product page? We are thinking about going based on referring domains and google analytics data (for the last 12 months). If any product page has 1+ referring domain or more then 50 organic sessions during 12 months then setup a redirect otherwise no redirect required. Thoughts? Thankyou.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brandonegroup0 -
SEO website migration gone wrong - noticed too late?
I have just been contacted by a company whose website has lost nearly all of its traffic. The web developers appeared to know nothing about the SEO aspects, when it came to migrating the website (this website change took place first week of August) - the traffic has gone from 7,000 sessions to 200 sessions a month. I can work through the usual SEO migration steps to help recover performance, yet normally I get employed on this kind of project as soon as the traffic loss is noticed... this time the traffic loss kicked in nearly 2 months ago - what are the implications of such a time lag re: SEO recovery?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Migrating From Parameter-Driven URL's to 'SEO Friendly URL's (Slugs)
Hi all, hope you're all good and having a wonderful Friday morning. At the moment we have over 20,000+ live products on our ecomms site, however, all of the products are using non-seo friendly URL's (/product?p=1738 etc) and we're looking at deploying SEO friendly url's such as (/product/this-is-product-one) etc. As you could imagine, making such a change on a big ecomms site will be a difficult task and we will have to take on A LOT of content changes, href-lang changes, affiliate link tests and a big 301 task. I'm trying to get some analysis together to pitch the Tech guys, but it's difficult, I do understand that this change has it's benefits for SEO, usability and CTR - but I need some more info. Keywords in the slugs - what is it's actual SEO weight? Has anyone here recently converted from using parameter based URL's to keyword-based slugs and seen results? Also, what are the best ways of deploying this? Add a canonical and 301? All comments greatly appreciated! Brett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
SEO Strategy help
Hi, I run a B2B 3rd party retail ecommerce site and I am kind of stuck on how to implement my SEO strategy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steve45058
So I learned from AdWords data that the best converting words to my site is the (Brand name, Model Number). Many of my B2B customers already know what they want/are looking for. Now this is all fine and dandy for adwords, but I don't really know how to implement this strategy on the SEO side. I do rank decent for some of these product keywords, but 99% of them I do not (which confuses me because some of the brands I rank high for are the more popular brands eg. more competition.) When I do keyword research on SEMRush or another site, it tells me that the competition for this type of keyword strategy is extremely high. Any Help, Advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!1 -
Link building strategy
Hello Moz Community, For the last couple of months we have been trying to improve our ranking in Google UK for the keyword "church candles" http://www.wattsandco.com/church-supplies/church-candles.html We’ve been contacting relevant interiors/lifestyle blogs to feature our candles including anchor text linking back to our page. Our anchor text has been predominately our brand (Watts & Co) but also other key search terms (Watts and Co church candles, Watts and Co pillar candles). We have been tracking our ranking for the keyword “Church candles” using the Moz “ Rank Tracker” and we started on position 15 in Google UK. We went up to 12 briefly before moving down every week to 15, 17, 19 and 22. We checked today and we have moved back up slightly to 19. Our progress seems to be a bit slow and inconsistent. We wanted to reach out for any advice on how we can move up? If there was any way we can improve our strategy? Here’s the links we have built so far: http://nostalgiecat.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/what-autumn-means-to-me.html http://blog.pollyrowan.com/2015/10/5-small-ways-to-decorate-your-home-that.html http://www.happyhomebird.com/2015/10/watts-co-candles-for-cosy-autumn-home.html http://www.frolic-blog.com/2015/10/beeswax-candles-for-fall/ http://hisforhomeblog.com/lighting/watts-co-church-candles/#axzz3qhqN1wzA http://lorilangille.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/sponsored-post-watts-and-co.html http://www.californiahomedesign.com/product-finds/waxing-poetic-must-have-candles Thanks so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roberthseo0 -
Urgent Site Migration Help: 301 redirect from legacy to new if legacy pages are NOT indexed but have links and domain/page authority of 50+?
Sorry for the long title, but that's the whole question. Notes: New site is on same domain but URLs will change because URL structure was horrible Old site has awful SEO. Like real bad. Canonical tags point to dev. subdomain (which is still accessible and has robots.txt, so the end result is old site IS NOT INDEXED by Google) Old site has links and domain/page authority north of 50. I suspect some shady links but there have to be good links as well My guess is that since that are likely incoming links that are legitimate, I should still attempt to use 301s to the versions of the pages on the new site (note: the content on the new site will be different, but in general it'll be about the same thing as the old page, just much improved and more relevant). So yeah, I guess that's it. Even thought the old site's pages are not indexed, if the new site is set up properly, the 301s won't pass along the 'non-indexed' status, correct? Thanks in advance for any quick answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDMcNamara0 -
What is the best strategy to get a company located in one city, but does business in other cities, ranked locally in the other cities as well?
For example: this client is a custom clothier located in Phoenix, but would like to come up in the search engines for Scottsdale, Tucson, Prescott, Chicago, etc., because he travels to those cities and does business there with his custom clothing business. His website is www.artfultailoring.com Right now, he'll come up for custom suits phoenix, custom shirts phoenix az, etc. So how would I get him to come up in the search engines in more locations than just Phoenix?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cgray010