Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI
      Moz Local

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Splitting and moving site to two domains - How to redirect

    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

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4
    13
    1515
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • rich.owings
      rich.owings last edited by

      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.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • EGOL
        EGOL @rich.owings last edited by

        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.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • rich.owings
          rich.owings @EGOL last edited by

          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.

          EGOL 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • EGOL
            EGOL @EGOL last edited by

            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.

            rich.owings 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • EGOL
              EGOL @EGOL last edited by

              It would also be a good idea to plan and announce the move. This can be done by:

              1. email and mail to important retail and wholesale clients.

              2. 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.

              3. inserts in retail shipments

              4. special advertising before the move

              5. special advertising and email after the move that gives old customers a nice discount when they make their first purchase on the new website.

              EGOL 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • EGOL
                EGOL @rich.owings last edited by

                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.

                EGOL 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • rich.owings
                  rich.owings @EGOL last edited by

                  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"

                  EGOL 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • donford
                    donford last edited by

                    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

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • EGOL
                      EGOL @rich.owings last edited by

                      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.

                      rich.owings 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • rjonesx. 0
                        rjonesx. 0 @EGOL last edited by

                        I like this idea too 🙂

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • rich.owings
                          rich.owings @EGOL last edited by

                          Thanks EGOL. Unfortunately they are committed to a full rebranding and want a new domain.

                          EGOL 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • rjonesx. 0
                            rjonesx. 0 last edited by

                            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).

                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • EGOL
                              EGOL last edited by

                              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.

                              rich.owings rjonesx. 0 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
                              • 1 / 1
                              • First post
                                Last post

                              Got a burning SEO question?

                              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                              Start my free trial


                              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.

                              • See all categories

                              Related Questions

                              • timdavis

                                Breaking up a site into multiple sites

                                Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last.  I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis
                                0
                              • blake.runyon

                                Canonical Question: Root Domain Geo Redirects to SubFolder.

                                Howdy, Working on a larger eComm site that 302s you based on your location. With that in mind should I canonicalize the final page. domain.com => 302 => domain.com/us/, domain.com/fr/, etc... (Should these all have a canonical pointing to the root domain.com?

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blake.runyon
                                0
                              • kellys.marketing

                                Two blogs on a single domain?

                                Hi  guys, Does anyone have any experience of having (trying to rank) two separate blogs existing on one domain, for instance: www.companysite.com/service1/blogwww.companysite.com/service2/blogThese 2 pages (service 1 and service 2) offer completely different services (rank for different keywords).(for example, a company that provides 2 separate services: SEO service and IT service)Do you think it is a good/bad/confusing search engine practice trying to have separate blogs for each service or do you think there should be only one blog that contains content for both services?Bearing in mind that there is an already existing subdomain for a non-profit part of business that ranks for different keywords: non-profit.companysite.comand it will potentially have another blog so the URL would look like: non-profit.companysite.com/blogAny ideas would be appreciated!Thanks

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kellys.marketing
                                0
                              • imran2078

                                Should I redirect my Google Update Effected Domain to brand new Domain?

                                Hey Moz experts, I had a domain which was really doing better but after the Humming Bird update my traffic was decreased up to 90%. There are plenty of posts on my existing blog, Now what should I do? I mean should I redirect it to a brand new domain or Copy all the posts to a brand new domain and delete my existing domain? Note that the Old domain has PR1, DA 19 and PA 30.

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imran2078
                                0
                              • Bio-RadAbs

                                Can you redirect specific sub domain URLs?

                                ello! We host our PDFs, Images, CSS all in a sub domain. For the question, let's call this sub.cyto.com. I've noticed a particular PDF doing really well, infact it has gathered valuable external links from high authoritative sites. To top it off, it gets good visits. I've been going back and forth with our developers to move this PDF to a subfolder structure.
                                For example: www.cyto.com/document/xxxx.pdf In my perspective, if I move this and set up a permanent redirect, then all the external links the PDF gathered, link juice and future visits will be attributed to the main website. Since the PDF is existing in the subdomain, I can't even track direct visits nor get the link juice. It appears in top position of Google as well. My developer says it is better to keep images, pdf, css in the subdomain. I see his point and an idea I have is to: convert the pdf to a webpage. Set up a 301 redirect from the existing subdomain to this webpage Upload the pdf with a new name and link to it from the webpage, so users can download if they choose to. This should give me the existing rank juice. However, my question is whether you can set up a 301 redirect for just a single subdomain URL to a folder structure URL? sub.cyto.com/xxx.pdf to www.cyto.com/document/xxxx.pdf?

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs
                                0
                              • lara_dar

                                Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?

                                I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
                                ...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
                                0
                              • sbrault74

                                Moving Content To Another Website With No Redirect?

                                I've got a website that has lots of valuable content and tools but it's been hit too hard by both Panda and Penguin. I came to the conclusion that I'd be better off with a new website as this one is going to hell no matter how much time and money I put in it. Had I started a new website the first time it got hit by Penguin, I'd be profitable today. I'd like to move some of that content to this other domain but I don't want to do 301 redirects as I don't want to pass bad link juice. I know I'll lose all links and visitors to the original website but I don't care. My only concern is duplicate content. I was thinking of setting the pages to noindex on the original website and wait until they don't appear in Google's index. Then I'd move them over to the new domain to be indexed again. Do you see any problem with this? Should I rewrite everything instead? I hate spinning content...!

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault74
                                1
                              • Hyrule

                                Splitting one Website into 2 Different New Websites with 301 redirects, help?

                                Here's the deal. My website stbands.com does fairly well. The only issue it is facing a long term branding crisis. It sells custom products and sporting goods. We decided that we want to make a sporting goods website for the retail stuff and then a custom site only focusing on the custom stuff. One website transformed and broken into 2 new ones, with two new brand names. The way we are thinking about doing this is doing a lot of 301 redirects, but what do we do with the homepage (stbands.com) and what is the best practice to make sure we don't lose traffic to the categories, etc.? Which new website do we 301 the homepage to? It's rough because for some keywords we rank 3 or 4 times on the first page. Scary times, but something must be done for the long term. Any advise is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance. We are set for a busy next few months 🙂

                                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hyrule
                                0

                              Get started with Moz Pro!

                              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                              Start my free trial
                              Products
                              • Moz Pro
                              • Moz Local
                              • Moz API
                              • Moz Data
                              • STAT
                              • Product Updates
                              Moz Solutions
                              • SMB Solutions
                              • Agency Solutions
                              • Enterprise Solutions
                              Free SEO Tools
                              • Domain Authority Checker
                              • Link Explorer
                              • Keyword Explorer
                              • Competitive Research
                              • Brand Authority Checker
                              • Local Citation Checker
                              • MozBar Extension
                              • MozCast
                              Resources
                              • Blog
                              • SEO Learning Center
                              • Help Hub
                              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                              • How-to Guides
                              • Moz Academy
                              • API Docs
                              About Moz
                              • About
                              • Team
                              • Careers
                              • Contact
                              Why Moz
                              • Case Studies
                              • Testimonials
                              Get Involved
                              • Become an Affiliate
                              • MozCon
                              • Webinars
                              • Practical Marketer Series
                              • MozPod
                              Connect with us

                              Contact the Help team

                              Join our newsletter
                              Moz logo
                              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                              • Accessibility
                              • Terms of Use
                              • Privacy

                              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.