To canonicalize an old site to a VERY young one
-
Hi,
The situation is I have an old e-commerce site with good Pagreank (13 yrs old) and a new 3 month old site. Currently with duplicate content because it's e-commerce site. The old site has two languages on each product page, the new site only English. Traffic to old site is half English, half the traffic is the other language.
Question is should I canonicalise to the new 3 month old domain that's only got English content at the moment? Soon it will also have both languages, but proper multi-lingual. The old site is meant to be for wholesalers, the new site for end-users. So the new site should get all the SE traffic it can get, I amnot worried about the old site not getting much because it has established userbase. If I canonicalise now, will I lose all the non English traffic to the old site? And is it a good idea to canonicalise to such a young domain? (on same IP C Block)What would you do?
-
Hey,
Thanks for the clarification - that makes sense.
In that case I think that what you're proposing should work - as long as the new pages are very similar (ideally the same).
As I said before it's a request rather than a directive so it might be ignored - I've tested cross-domain canonicals before - but not quite like this so it's hard for me to say precisely what might happen.
Obviously I'd also recommend undertaking some link building direct to the new site too - although I'm sure you plan to do that in any case
Thanks
Hannah
-
Hi Hannah,
thanks for the reply.
The multi-lingual product pages will be split nicely. That is on the cards.
The new site is meant for end users (direct to public) as an e-commerce site, and the client wants/ needs to keep the old domain for his wholesaler network. We can sacrifice its organic traffic.
So we don't want to 301 anything.
I just want to shift SHIFT the bulk of the organic traffic (which is end-user traffic) to the new site.
The pages will be very similar on both sites in terms of content.
-
Hello there,
I'm a little confused about your intention here - what are your eventual plans for the old site?
Are you looking to 301 it to the new site at some point? If so, I think rather than creating a new site and 301-ing the old one to it I'd be more inclined to simply implement your new site on the old domain with all of the age and strength - i.e. re-use your strong URLs rather than creating new ones.
Alternatively if you plan to keep both sites going I'm not sure that this is best the solution. Rel-Canonical is a request rather than a directive - as such the search engines can choose to ignore it. Particularly if the pages on the new site are not actually the same as the pages on the old site. As such you may find that the rel-canonical is ignored and the new site doesn't benefit.
I'm also a little worried about having multi-lingual content on the same page - ordinarily in an instance like this I'd recommend creating separate sub-folders to target different languages (e.g. a sub-folder for all of your English pages and a sub-folder for your other language).
I hope this helps,
Hannah
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
-
New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site. My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all? The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map. Any help would be gladly received. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesBryant0 -
Redirecting Pages from site A to site B
Hi, I have a client who have a solid, high ranking content based site (site A). They have now created an ecommerce site in addition (site B). To give site B a boost in terms of search engine visibility upon launch, they now wish to redirect approx 90% of site As pages to site B. What would be the implications of this? Apart from customers being automatically redirected from the page they thought they where landing on, how would google now view site A? What are your thoughts to thier idea. I am trying to talk them out of it as I think its a poor one.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
On-Site Directory - Delete or Keep?
We have 2 ecommerce sites. Both have been hit by Penguin (no warnings in WMT) and we're in the process of cleaning up backlinks. We have link directories on both sites. They've got links that are relevant to the sites but also links that aren't relevant. And they're big directories - we're talking thousands of links to other sites. What's the best approach here? Do we leave it alone, delete the whole thing, or manually review and keep highly relevant links but get rid of the rest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Severe health issues are found on your site. - Check site health (GWT)
Hi, We run a Magento website - When i log in to Google Webmaster Tools, I am getting this message: Severe health issues are found on your site. - <a class="GNHMM2RBFH">Check site health
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
</a>Is robots.txt blocking important pages? Some important page is blocked by robots.txt. Now, this is the weird part - the page being blocked is the admin page of magento - under
www.domain.com/index.php/admin/etc..... Now, this message just wont go away - its been there for days now - so why does Google think this is an "important page"? It doesnt normally complain if you block other parts of the site ?? Any ideas? THanks0 -
Is the Tool Forcing Sites to Link Out?
Hi I have a tool that I wish to give to sites, it allows the user to get an accurate idea of their credit score with out giving away any personal data and with out having a credit search done on their file. Due to the way the tool works and to make the implementation on other peoples sites as simple as possible the tool remains hosted by me and a one line piece of Javascript code just needs to be added to the code of the site wishing to use the tool. This code includes a link to my site to call the information from my server to allow the tool to show and work on the other site. My questions are: Could this cause a problem with Google as far as their link quality goes? - Are we forcing people to give us a backlink to use the tool? (in the eyes of Google) or will Google not be able to read the Javascript / will ignore the link for SEO purposes? Should I make the link in the code Nofollow? If I should make the link a Nofollow any tips on how to make the most of the opportunity from a link building or SEO point of view? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MotoringSEO0 -
What is the best: one big site or several small ones?
Sometimes I've felt that my choice was incorrect. I know taht with a big amount of content on the same subject a bigger one is better: it’s easier to maintain, and a big number of pages is good for Google ranking, but when you have many small sites, each one focusing on a totally different subject, you can crosslink them and this will improve your rankings. Furthermore, many small sites allow you to focus in specific niches and help you rank better for different keywords. So, what is the best choice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sergio_redondo0 -
Multiple sites in the same niche
Hi All A question regarding multiple sites in the same niche... If I have say 10 sites all targetting the same niche yet all on different C-class IPs with different hosts, registrars, whois data and ages can I use the same template, or will Google discern a pattern? Basically I have developed a WordPress template which I want to use on the sites albeit with different logos / brand colours. NB/ All of the 10 sites will have unique, original content and they will NOT be interlinked
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielparry1 -
Should I Combine 30 websites into one?
I have a Private health care company that I have just begun consulting for. Currently in addition to the main website serving the whole group, 30 individual sites which are for each of the hospitals in their group. Each has it's own domain. Each site, has practically identical content: something that will be addressed in my initial audits. But should I suggest that they combine all the sites into one domain, providing individual category pages for each hosptial, or am I really going to suggest that each of the 30 sites, create unique content of their own. This means thirty pages of content on "hip replacements" thirty different versions of "our treatement" etc, and bearing in mind they all run off the same CMS, even with different body text, the pages are going to be practically identical. It's a big call either way! The reason they started out with all these sites, is that each hospital is it's own cost centre and whilst the web development team is a centralized resource. They each have their own sites to try and rank indivdually for local searches, naturally as they will each tend to get customers from their own local area. Not every hospital provides the full range of treatments.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ultramod0