Two Domains, Same Products/Content
-
We're an e-commerce company with two domains. One is our original company name/domain, one is a newer top-level domain. The older domain doesn't receive as much traffic but is still searched and used by long-time customers who are loyal to that brand, who we don't want to alienate.
The sites are both identical in products and content, which creates a duplicate content issue. I have come across two options so far:
1. a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one.
2. Optimize the content on the newer domain (the strongest of the two) and leave the older domain content as is.
Does anyone know of a solution better than the two I listed above or have experience resolving a similar problem in the past?
-
The original poster's situation sounds like merging two sites rather than moving a site from one domain name to another. Matt Cutts specifically recommended against using the Change of Address tool for merging sites in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6pyAWJ5BRs
-
Having been in a similar situation before, I definitely vote 301 redirect asap, _provided that the old domain has a clean backlink profile._The last thing you want to do is tank organic traffic by adding the old site's spam links to the main site.
Make sure both sites are in Google Search Console, and neither has any manual action notices. Then go into "links to your site" and download all links. Get links from Moz's Open Site Explorer and Bing's Webmaster Tools as well (and any other tools you have); You want as complete a picture as possible. Once you have as many links as you can find, start auditing manually. After a while it will become easier to spot spam links, as they tend to have an easily recognizable pattern.
If you find spam links, remove and disavow before you redirect. Note that you'll have to disavow bad links to the old site **on the new site's disavow file **when you redirect it, as that's where Google will look for it. If you don't find spam, redirect.
I wouldn't let the site rot. That would be a potential security issue and a customer service nightmare.
-
There are a few options. I do recommend "picking one" domain and 301 redirecting that one to the preferred domain. Then make sure you use the Google Change of Address tool to tell Google that you've moved.
Another option is to keep both sites live and then use the Canonical Tag to tell Google which domain is the preferred one. You'll have to do that at the page level, on each individual page.
I prefer, though, to use the 301 redirect option and the Change of Address tool.
-
Your welcome I'm glad I could help.
-
Thanks for the comment Jordan, very helpful.
-
Is there a particular reason that you don't want to 301-redirect the old domain to the new domain? If customers go to the old domain or even search the domain name, they'll be redirected to the new one automatically. Can you help us understand why this is not ideal?
-
I'd recommend doing a 301 redirect to the new domain. You want to rectify that duplicate content issue as soon as possible. If the new site is intuitive and has the same content and products you would not be alienating your long time customer base. I would recommend doing a page to page redirect though as opposed to a blanket redirect to the new domain entirely both Moz and Google have some good resources on this.
You can easily crawl both sites with Moz or Screaming frog and put in your 301's that way. Hope this helps let me know if you have any other questions.
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
-
Migrating Subfolder content to New domain Safely
Hello everyone, I'm currently facing a challenging situation and would greatly appreciate your expertise and guidance. I own a website, maniflexa.com, primarily focused on the digital agency niche. About 3 months ago, I created a subfolder, maniflexa.com/emploi/, dedicated to job listings which is a completely different niche. The subfolder has around 120 posts and pages. Unfortunately, since I created the subfolder, the rankings of my main site have been negatively impacted. I was previously ranking #1 for all local digital services keywords, but now, only 2 out of 16 keywords have maintained their positions. Other pages have dropped to positions 30 and beyond. I'm considering a solution and would like your advice: I'm planning to purchase a new domain and migrate the content from maniflexa.com/emploi/ to newdomain.com. However, I want to ensure a smooth migration without affecting the main domain maniflexa.com rankings and losing backlinks from maniflexa.com/emploi/ pages. Is moving the subfolder content to a new domain a viable solution? And how can I effectively redirect all pages from the subfolder to the new domain while preserving page ranks and backlinks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidifaso
I wish they did, but GSC doesn't offer a solution to migration content from subfolder to a new domain. 😢 Help a fellow Mozer. Thanks for giving a hand.0 -
What does Disallow: /french-wines/?* actually do - robots.txt
Hello Mozzers - Just wondering what this robots.txt instruction means: Disallow: /french-wines/?* Does it stop Googlebot crawling and indexing URLs in that "French Wines" folder - specifically the URLs that include a question mark? Would it stop the crawling of deeper folders - e.g. /french-wines/rhone-region/ that include a question mark in their URL? I think this has been done to block URLs containing query strings. Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Content Aggregation Site: How much content per aggregated piece is too much?
Let's say I set up a section of my website that aggregated content from major news outlets and bloggers around a certain topic. For each piece of aggregated content, is there a bad, fair, and good range of word count that should be stipulated? I'm asking this because I've been mulling it over—both SEO (duplicate content) issues and copyright issues—to determine what is considered best practice. Any ideas about what is considered best practice in this situation? Also, are there any other issues to consider that I didn't mention?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
Duplicate content - how to diagnose duplicate content from another domain before publishing pages?
Hi, 🙂 My company is having new distributor contract, and we are starting to sell products on our own webshop. Bio-technology is an industry in question and over 1.000 products. Writing product description from scratch would take many hours. The plan is to re-write it. With permission from our contractors we will import their 'product description' on our webshop. But, I am concerned being penalies from Google for duplicate content. If we re-write it we should be fine i guess. But, how can we be sure? Is there any good tool for comparing only text (because i don't want to publish the pages to compare URLs)? What else should we be aware off beside checking 'product description' for duplicate content? Duplicate content is big issue for all of us, i hope this answers will be helpful for many of us. Keep it hard work and thank you very much for your answers, Cheers, Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Our main domain has thousands of subdomains with same content (expired hosting), how should we handle it?
Hello, Our client allows users to create free-trial subdomains and once the trial expires, all the domains have the same page. If people stick, their own websites are hosted on the subdomain. Since all these expired trials subdomains have the same content and are linking towards the Homepage, should they be nofollows? Has anyone dealt with something similar? Thanks very much in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCAILLE0 -
Website.com/blog/post vs website.com/post
I have clients with Wordpress sites and clients with just a Wordpress blog on the back of website. The clients with entire Wordpress sites seem to be ranking better. Do you think the URL structure could have anything to do with it? Does having that extra /blog folder decrease any SEO effectiveness? Setting up a few new blogs now...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PortlandGuy0 -
.co.uk domain with romanian content
Hello, I want to build a blog on a .co.uk domain that targets Romanians from uk. The blog will be in Romanian. What recommendation do you have regarding Google, should I submit the website to google.co.uk or google.ro. Did you had any cases like this? Cornel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cornel_Ilea0 -
Virtual Domains and Duplicate Content
So I work for an organization that uses virtual domains. Basically, we have all our sites on one domain and then these sites can also be shown at a different URL. Example: sub.agencysite.com/store sub.brandsite.com/store Now the problem comes up often when we move the site to a brand's URL versus hosting the site on our URL, we end up with duplicate content. Now for god knows what damn reason, I currently cannot get my dev team to implement 301's but they will implement 302's. (Dont ask) I also am left with not being able to change the robots.txt file for our site. They say if we allowed people to go in a change this stuff it would be too messy and somebody would accidentally block a site that was not supposed to be blocked on our domain. (We are apparently incapable toddlers) Now I have an old site, sub.agencysite.com/store ranking for my terms while the new site is not showing up. So I am left with this question: If I want to get the new site ranking what is the best methodology? I am thinking of doing a 1:1 mapping of all pages and set up 302 redirects from the old to the new and then making the canonical tags on the old to reflect the new. My only thing here is how will Google actually view this setup? I mean on one hand I am saying
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
"Hey, Googs, this is just a temp thing." and on the other I am saying "Hey, Googs, give all the weight to this page, got it? Graci!" So with my limited abilities, can anybody provide me a best case scenario?0