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
-
Merging two sites to one Rel Can Question
Hi All, We have 2 brands (1 main 1 product as a satellite domain) that we're merging into our main brand. When doing a 301 redirect - should we redirect everypage of the product satellite to the new site or is 1 main redirect fine? I'm Confusing ....yep. Ill do an E.G www.nike.com & www.air-jordan.com we are now shutting down www.airjordan.com and will be migrating all the content to www.nike.com/air-jordan Just of course there will be other pages like air-jordan.com/order-now . Should i do a rel can from air-jordan.com/order-now to www.nike.com/air-jordan/order-now ? Or is simply a 301 from www.airjordan.com to www.nike.com/air-jordan sufficient? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFCU0 -
301 old site to new site?
I have client with an old site - www.bestfamilylawattorney.com - which had a lot of spammy links (and bad rankings). Instead of fixing those issues, we started a new URL - www.berenjifamilylaw.com - with new content and redesign. Should I do a 301 redirect from old to new domain? If the old site was being penalized, would a 301 transfer that penalty? I just want to make sure I don't end up hurting the new site after doing all the work to start fresh. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
There is no change of address pending for your site
Hi everyone. Google has recently started using our old .net instead of .com in the SERPS. I went to do a change of address for the old http://www.sqlsentry.net and it gives me the "There is no change of address pending for your site." I've tried for both www and non-www and still get the same result. All pages seem to be redirecting to the new site with no issues. Is there anything else I can do to change this? Or is there a step I'm missing? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Reindexing a site with www.
We have a site that has a mirror - i.e. www.domain.com and domain.com - there is not redirect both url's work and show pages so basically a site with 2 sets of URLs for each page. We have changed it so the domain.com and all assorted pages 301 redirect to the right URL with www. i.e. domain.com/about 301's to www.domain.com/about In the search engines the domain.com is the site indexed and the only www. page indexed is the homepage. I checked in the robots.txt file and nothing blocking the search engines from indexing both the www. and non www. versions of the site which makes me wonder why did only one version get indexed and how did the clients avoid a duplicate content issue? Secondly is it best to get the search engines to unidex domain.com and resubmit www.domain.com for the full site? We are definately staying with the www.domain.com NOT domain.com so need to find the best way to get the site indexed with www. and remove the non www. Hope that makes sense and look forward to everyone's input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
If we remove all of the content for a branch office in one city from a web site, will it harm rankings for the other branches?
We have a client with a large, multi-city home services business. The service offerings vary from city to city, so each branch has it's own section on a fairly large (~6,000 pages) web site. Each branch drives a significant amount of revenue from organic searches specific to its geographic location (ex: Houston plumbers or Fort Worth landscaping). Recently, one of the larger branches has decided that it wants its own web site on a new domain because they have been convinced by an SEO firm that they can get better results with a standalone site. That branch wants us to remove all of its content (700-800 pages) on the current site and has said we can 301 all inbound links to the removed content to other pages on the existing site to mitigate any loss to domain authority. The other branch managers want to know if removing this city-specific content could negatively impact search rankings for their cities. On the surface it seems like as long as we have proper redirects in place, the other branches should be okay. Am I missing something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monkeeboy0 -
Moving from a static HTML CSS site with .html files to a Wordpress Site while keeping link structure
Mozzers, Hope this finds you well. I need some advice. We have a site built with a dreamweaver template, and it is lacking in responsiveness, ease of updates, and a lot of the coding is behind traditional web standards (which I know will start to hurt our rank - if not the user experience). For SEO purposes, we would like to move the existing static based site to Wordpress so we can update it easily and keep content fresh. Our current site, thriveboston.com, has a lot of page extensions ending in .html. For the transition, it is extremely important for us to keep the link structure. We rank well in the SERPs for Boston Counseling, etc... I found and tested a plugin (offline) that can add a .html extension to Wordpress pages, which allows us to keep our current structure, but has anyone had any luck with this live? Has anyone had any luck moving from a static site - to a Wordpress site - while keeping the current link structure - without hurting any rank? We hope to move soon because if the site continues to grow, it will become even harder to migrate the site over. Also, does anyone have any hesitations? It this a bad move? Should we just stay on the current DWT template (the HTML and CSS) and not migrate? Any suggestions and advice will be heeded. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _Thriveworks0 -
Similar sites on same IP address
Hello, A client has a small number (3) of large price comparison sites which have been launched on separate subdomains - BUT all on the same hosting IP address. The roll out of the sites was not ideal from an SEO perspective - as basically cloned versions of the sites were initially launched and indexed - and are only now being customised i.e. unique content added to each of the category and sub category pages. The first site initially got some traffic - and so did the 2nd in the early days - but then they both bombed (especially number 2). So we think there has probably been some kind of slap / sandboxing. We are starting to see some very early signs of recovery now some months after. My questions is - would it be a wise move to migrate each of the sites to a separate IP address as we start to evolve and optimise each site. Or are they ok to be left on the same hosting / IP address? The sites in question are : shop.deliaonline.com shop.ivillage.co.uk rewards.bestforfilm.com Thanks in advance for your help. Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichBestSEO0 -
Hit by Penguin, Can I move the content from the old site to a new domain and start again with the same content which is high quality
I need some advice please. My website got the unnatural links detected message and was hit by penguin.. hard. Can I move the content from the current domain to a new domain and start again or does the content need to be redone also. I will obviously turn of the old domain once its moved. The other option is to try and identify the bad links and change my anchor profile which is a hit and miss task in my opinion. Would it not be easier just to identify the good links pointing to the old domain and get those changed to point to the new domain with better anchors. thanks Warren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | warren0071