Site move?

[Jjjay]

What happens in a site move from a subdomain to a new domain and how does that effect the root domain of the subdomain and whether or not the subdomain SEO would be transferred to the new domain?

[effectdigital]

Oh lord I really don't like working with Shopify haha! Basically I avoid it like the plague, although I will admit it is slowly, slowly improving

We have one or two clients who run Shopify and we absolutely do the best we can for them, but the truth is usually their results improve 'more' after they leave the platform. I can say that, Shopify is a good product for one-man-bands and people who 'just need a site' that looks professional (for their business cards etc) but no, it's not SEO-competitive (at all)

I don't make a huge effort to keep up with all of Shopify's changes and stuff, because what I have realised is that the fundamental philosophy of the platform (which is unlikely to change) goes against the competitive art and practice of SEO. When the platform stifles and limits 'what you can do' - how can it ever be bleeding edge? You end up confined

Email is on our Moz profile here if you want to have a chat about it. If you're moving 'away' from Shopify, there may be some pains there in terms of redirect limitations - but I'd need to look again and familiarise myself with what they can currently offer in that regard

[Jjjay]

thank you effectdigital for your thorough answer - really appreciate you taking the time to do so !

Do you work with Shopify at all?

If so, Is it possible to have a direct conversation with you regarding this topic?

[effectdigital]

If everything is done properly, the old site loses rankings for the content which is extracted and placed somewhere else. Hopefully the new site manages to achieve similar rankings for the migrated content, but there are a number of factors which could inhibit that

One thing would be the 'sandbox' that Google often puts around fresh domains which can see rankings inhibited for 3-6 months if the domain is very new (if it's never been used before, if it's only been a domain-sales based holding page before, or if the domain was misused in the past)

Other than that, a proper 301 redirect migration project would be needed to see as small a dip in performance as possible. You hope is that the old site loses all associated rankings and the new site picks them up again, but things seldom go this smoothly with such large and complex projects. What usually happens is that you lose the associated rankings from the old site and on the new site you often see a 10-15% dip in traffic, yes - even if you think all your redirects are perfect!

Remember that page-loading speeds affect rankings. If the new site is seen as a 'small project' and an 'offshoot' it is unlikely to gain the same strong hosting environment as the main site has - even if both sites are built using the same technology. As such you can sometimes see ranking reductions due to that

There's other stuff. Sometimes people only move the content across but don't move any of the Meta / technical SEO which existed on the old pages, to the new pages. Failed tech / Meta migration can also impact rankings quite prominently (thinks like H1s changing, custom URL slugs changing, Meta data changing, Schema getting 'lost' etc)

If the UX of the new site is poor or very different to that of the old site, that could potentially affect results

With 301 redirects there are numerous factors that can dampen their effectiveness:

• Creating too many links to redirects, internally or externally
• Creating redirect chains
• Misuse of redirect types (e.g: using a 302 or Meta refresh instead of a 301)
• Content similarity (e.g: if Google harvests the content on the old page and new page, using something like Boolean string similarity to compare - if the content has a low 'percentage' of similarity, you're not likely to see the SEO authority go across. This is a massively important one
• If Google believes that moving the content is an attempt to manipulate organic-search (SEO) rankings (e.g: if the content is moving purely so it can exist on an exact-match domain, and therefore get higher SEO rankings - but actually no value for the user is added by moving the content out)
• If Google believes the content has been moved from one organisation, brand or entity to another (aka the content has been sold for SEO purposes) that could influence how they look at the movement

... there are so many possible factors. Tread carefully and make sure all the 301 redirects are completely on-point with no errors, and the dip you may observe will likely be short and small. But if you go against Google, you could just lose everything and never see it again!