Moving website and domain name without 301 Redirect or rel=canonical
-
I do not wish to draw attention to my company, so I am using code names. For the sake of this discussion, we are a new car dealership representing Brand X Cars. The manufacturer of Brand X Cars pushes its dealers toward a website hosting company called CarWebsites in order to maintain a level of quality and control with each dealer. However, we have found the platform to be too restricting, and are switching to our own WordPress site.
Unfortunately Brand X is claiming ownership of our original domain, BrandXCarDealer.net, so we have switched to BrandXCarDealer.com (which we prefer anyways). Now both websites are running, and there is duplicate content of everything. Brand X is not cooperative and will not 301 redirect to the new site, and we do not have access to the of the website for a rel=canonical. Brand X is also dragging its feet on shutting down BrandXCarDealer.net. We do still have access to change the content of the pages on the BrandXCarDealer.net site, but that is pretty much as far as our control goes.
So my question is, is there anything we can do, without using a 301 redirect or rel=canonical, to tell Google to pay attention to the new BrandXCarDealer.com rather than the old BrandXCarDealer.net? Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!
-
Thanks, this is all great advice! I'll have to look into the CarWebsites Terms of Use to see if we have a leg to stand on when it comes to domain and content ownership.
The local listings and most other links around the web are already pointing to the new site, so that is a good thing.
That is very interesting about the .CARS extension. I have always wondered if that would have an impact... I might try that when I get some time down the road.
I have also been considering going to each landing page on the old BrandXCarDealer.net site, erase all the content, and replace it with, "This page has been moved to BrandXCarDealer.com/landing-page-1"
Any thoughts?
-
Sherry, unfortunately, without having a 301 redirect in place, there's not much you can do to directly tell Google that the site has been moved. In order to use their Google Change of Address Tool, you have to set up the 301 permanent redirect from the old URL to the new URL (old domain to new domain). If you can get access, that's what you really need to do.
If the old site won't be taken down, there are a few things you can do, like send them a stern letter or let the lawyers get involved. Typically a letter from a lawyer will get their attention. You can, also, file a DMCA request with their web host, which they must comply with, telling the web host that the material on the old site is copyrighted (you own the copyright and rights to it) and it must be taken down.
If they won't give you the domain name, then you can file a UDRP domain dispute with ICANN to try to get ahold of the domain name. That will take some time, though. But in the long run you'll get ahold of the domain and be able to redirect it.
In the meantime, while you're dealing with all of this, you can begin to get all of your local listings (like Google My Business, etc.) and local citations moved over to point to your new site rather than the old site. In fact, you can start building links to the new domain name and Google will, hopefully, start ranking your new domain name higher in the search results.
Finally, you might actually consider moving the site to a .CARS domain extension, we've seen some really great success from dealerships that have moved from a .COM to a .CARS domain.
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
-
Why My Website's Rank still in Millions
I am getting enough Traffic on my website on best weed killer on affiliate but Moz still showing its Rank in millions. What would be the best strategy to improve the rankings.???
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sarahelen0 -
My Brand new website shows 79% spam Score, what is the reason and how should I deal with this?
Hi, I have just launched my website 1 month before and I have used all paid images, Uniquely written contents, Everything is genuine for better SEO experience in the future. The actual problem is its showing spam by 79% in MOZ bar, I don't have a single link on my website also my content is unique, Images are unique. Why its showing so much spam on this brand new website? Can you please help me? I am very stressed due to this problem.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rahat640 -
Without prerender.io, is google able to render & index geographical dynamic content?
One section of our website is built as a single page application and serves dynamic content based on geographical location. Before I got here, we had used prerender.io so google can see the page, but now that prerender.io is gone, is google able to render & index geographical dynamic content? I'm assuming no. If no is the answer, what are some solutions other than converting everything to html (would be a huge overhaul)?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | imjonny1231 -
Do any sub-domains act as Private Blog Networks?
Hi All, We can see now that Google rolled 2 unconfirmed algo updates this month and they are penalising spam links and sites which use Private blog networks; as said by some SEO experts. Do any sub-domains act as PBNs because of too much linking...like linking website pages from every page of sub-domains?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
IT want to do a name server redirect
Hi, I am in a little bit of a pickle, and hope that you clever people can help me... A little background: In April this year we relaunched one of our brands as a standalone business. I set up page to page 301 redirects from the old website to the new branded domain. From an SEO perspective this relaunch went amazingly smoothly - we only lost around 10% of traffic and that was just for a couple of months. We now get more traffic than ever before. Basically it's all going swimmingly. I noticed yesterday that the SSL certificate on the old domain has expired, so I asked IT to repurchase one for us to maintain the 301 redirects. IT are saying that they would prefer to do a name server redirect instead, which would remove all the page to page 301s. They are saying that this would maintain the SEO. As far as I am aware this wouldn't. Please can someone help me put together a polite but firm response to basically say no? Thanks, I really welcome and appreciate your help on this! Amelia
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CommT0 -
My Website Just Got Penalized
I had a website that recently got penalized. The pagerank dropped to zero on the homepage and moved to page 200 on google. I checked manual actions on my site in web mastertools and it says that no webspam is found. I am curious to find out why my website would drop. I had a a network of 5 blogs that I was linking to the site that also lost page rank but theres is N/A now. I am thinking thats where the trouble started because i did not use no follow. Question 1 My question is if I remove all the links to the other site or make them no follow will the penalty lift. I am thinking that the penalty is an automated on and not a manual one. Does any one have experience with automated penalties? Did they lift after you fixed the issues. Did you regain most of your original rankings? Question 2 What happens to all my blogs. I spent all lot of money on have posts written for it. Can any of the content be salvaged. I have over 1000 pages written on 5 different blogs. I can send you a list of the urls so you can see what I am talking about.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WindshieldGuy-2762210 -
Cross linking websites of the same company, is it a good idea
As a user I think it is beneficial because those websites are segmented to answer to each customer needs, so I wonder if I should continue to do it or avoid it as much as possible if it damages rankings...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mcany0 -
Should i buy this domain because it has a keyword that im trying to rank for?
Im trying to rank for a keyword and i saw that this domain is available the top listing under this search team is a domain authority 14 and according to seo site explorer has 1 page linking to it and its a no follow link. Would it make since to buy this domain optimize it and forward it back to my main site or is this bad to do.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gslc0