How to move a site slowly

[JAARON]

I've got a site that I started back in 2001 (www.jaaroncaststone.com) to sell what I was making, concrete countertops and sinks. Well we're going to be discontinuing the concrete products in a month or so and want to start pointing all the links from the old site to a new one dedicated to a single product (www.jaaron-wood-countertops.com). I don't want to do a full 301 on the old site just yet but can I put a canonical tag on the index and about us pages pointing to the new site now so the search engines start looking that way or should I wait and do a full 301 when the day comes to pull the old site?

[JAARON]

Thanks guys. I just moved the whole thing over yesterday using 301 redirects for all the pages. Did the change of address for google but I guess bing doesn't have this sort of thing?

[JaneCopland]

Hi Joshua,

Shailendra is correct that you should only use the canonical tag for content that is either identical or very, very similar. Unfortunately, the cleanest way to do this from an SEO perspective is still to do a full 301, as this eliminates any confusion Google is going to come up against. I feel that you're running into dangerous grounds by trying to move over slowly. You should also be using the "change of address" option within Webmaster Tools to show Google that the site has moved, when you're ready to flip the switch: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83106

[IM_Learner]

Since you are about to drop the pages talking about the "concrete countertops", i would not recommend to use canonical tags. This tag is helpful when you have the duplicate content on the same domain or two or more different domains. But in your case you will not have the content.

On the other hand, you can use this tag for the content that you will migrate from old site to the new one.  In one of the Whiteboard Fridays, Rand spoke about the swiftness and effectiveness of canonical tag.

Regards