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
-
Our new site will be using static site generator which is supposed to be better for SEO?
Hi folks, Our dev team is planning on building our new marketing webpages on SSG or Static Site Generator(we are stepping away from SSR). Based on my research this is something that can help our SEO in particular for site speed (our site has a poor score).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TyEl
Are there any challenges or concerns I should be aware regarding this direction? If so what are they and how can this be addressed? Thanks0 -
70 sites on one instance/server negative for SEO?
Hi Guys, One of our clients is building individual sites for each store they have, which in total would be 70 different websites on one server (they used the word instance). I was wondering if there could be negative issues with this for SEO purposes? Cheers, Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wozniak650 -
Why does some sites rank with no seo
Why is it that some site rank with zero efforts? I have been working on some seo for a while on my main site and i have been getting more info competition analysis with sem and moz. Looking at the states from this website which tends to popup often in the searches on page 1-2 before my site. This site is not keyword optimized, meaning they arent even trying to rank.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CooperStrzelecki
There is no content, articles etc.,
6 backlinks (nothing powerful just 2 directory links and 2 from developer)
Site really isnt even designed to get traffic as its a trade only ecommerce website
I doubt they are hiding anything as far as backlinks etc. as it will get them too many visitors they dont want
The city i am searching isnt even on the page (it is a city within a city so maybe google still relates it)
PA 24 DA 15 Now my site:
Optimized reasearched keywords
175 backlinks
All my main pages have content with images, alt tags, internal linking
full of content, blogs, videos, products (probably 4000, could a site being too big be an issue?)
Site gets regular updates
I probably have 200 citations
All the social media which gets done often
PA 32 DA 20 They do get a good bit of traffic but that is probably the only thing i would see but it would be direct traffic mostly i believe as it would be people going to order regularly since it is a print reseller. They may have some age on me 15 vs 8 years. Could it be some kind of penalty i am not sure about lingering? According to what i know to check everyything looks ok, no shady links accoding to sem. I am working more and more on all the pages but this competittion site really doesnt have crap going on probably 8 pages and 1 page does all the ordering. What the hell does google want from me exactly!0 -
Splitting One Site Into Two Sites Best Practices Needed
Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own. The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter. The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time. Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances. For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Micro Site Penalty?
I have been carrying out On-Page optimisation only for a client www.shade7.co.nz. After three months or so I have been getting some great results, improving to the top three positions for at least 30 of 45 keywords targeted. Couple of more tweaks and I would be a very happy camper. Disaster overnight! Rankings CRASH! Unbeknown to me the client a month or so back decided to link just about every product/link on a micro site he owns (www.shademakers.com/ ) plus one other site he owns. Explorer I think discovered over 350 back-links (follow) from these sites! As this is a site he owns and it is targeting the same keywords I presume this falls into the EVIL bucket of SEO. Two part question do you believe I am correct that this is the reason for this rankings crash and what would be the best way to resolve this! server-side 301 redirect for the micro site? Delete the micro site (drastic measure) Remove all the links other than maybe one in the contact page saying visit our other site shade7 other options? The client or I have not received any bad link Emails from Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Moving-Web-SEO-Auckland0 -
Mobile Site Outranking Main Site
Hi, We have recently been hit with a problem regarding our mobile site, where it is outranking our main site. This is causing a drop in orders and ranknings for our main site. It would appear that google has indexed our mobile site and so the two are now competing against each other. Our main site is on a .co.uk and our mobile site on a .mobi, but we have now taken down the mobile site until we get this sorted. Does anyone else have any experience of this happening and how to stop it happening again? Thanks Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steve251 -
Why does a site have no domain authority?
A website was built and launched eight months ago, and their domain authority is 1. When a site has been live for a while and has such a low DA, what's causing it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optimalwebinc0 -
SEO for an exponentially growing site?
Hey Mozers! I was having a quick chat with a friend the other day on doing SEO for a site that grows in page size at an exponential rate and was just wondering how you would go about optimizing it? The example that we used would be a site that allowed users to upload videos and then have people vote on two videos against each other. So, if there are 100 uploaded videos and each of them are pared up with the other 99 to create a unique voting/battle page which has it's own unique URL, the site can get very large, VERY quickly. Meaning if just one more video is uploaded there would be How exactly would you go about optimizing the site? My biggest area of confusion would be generating sitemaps. I'm aware of best practices with large sitemaps (i.e. having a sitemap of sitemaps, not going over 50k in entries per sitemap etc..) But, how would you go about creating the sitemaps for this website if it's growing at an exponential rate, if at all? If you have any other questions feel free to ask and I'll clarify it. Thanks! 😃 **TL;DR How would you optimize a site that grows at an exponential rate? **
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanChoo0