Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • Case Studies
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      What is your Brand Authority?
      Moz

      What is your Brand Authority?

      Check yours now
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • SEO Q&A

        Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • Case Studies

        Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Best approach to launch a new site with new urls - same domain

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Best approach to launch a new site with new urls - same domain

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    5
    20
    7381
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • STPseo
      STPseo last edited by

      www.sierratradingpost.com

      We have a high volume e-commerce website with over 15K items, an average of 150K visits per day and 12.6 pages per visit. We are launching a new website this spring which is currently on a beta sub domain and we are looking for the best strategy that preserves our current search rankings while throttling traffic (possibly 25% per week) to measure results.

      The new site will be soft launched as we plan to slowly migrate traffic to it via a load balancer. This way we can monitor performance of the new site while still having the old site as a backup. Only when we are fully comfortable with the new site will we submit the 301 redirects and migrate everyone over to the new site. We will have a month or so of running both sites.

      Except for the homepage the URL structure for the new site is different than the old site.

      What is our best strategy so we don’t lose ranking on the old site and start earning ranking on the new site, while avoiding duplicate content and cloaking issues?

      Here is what we got back from a Google post which may highlight our concerns better:

      http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=62d0a16c4702a17d&hl=en&fid=62d0a16c4702a17d00049b67b51500a6

      Thank You,

      sincerely,

      Stephan Woo Cude

      SEO Specialist

      scude@sierratradingpost.com

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • LeslieVS
        LeslieVS last edited by

        Hi there,

        I was just reading this old thread to get some info, but I'd love it if you could share you actual results from the launch. What did you do and how much did traffic change? How long before you were back to normal?

        I usually find that with a new website and all new URLs, I end up seeing maybe a month or sodip in traffic that can be up to 10%. But that seems to be less and less as time goes on. The search engines are usually on top of it though, they recrawl and recatalog quite quickly.

        Would love to hear from you.

        Thanks!

        Leslie

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • Tom-Anthony
          Tom-Anthony @STPseo last edited by

          Just to chime in on this, albeit maybe a little late now... I had the same thought as I was reading through this with using rel=canonical to point the old pages to the new for now, so the search engines don't have any duplicate content issues until a 301 redirect can take over when the new site is fully launched.

          However, depending on your rollout schedule, this would mean that the SERPs would soon be indexing only the new pages. You'd need to ensure that the traffic diverter you are using would handle this. Otherwise you could put the rel=canonical on the new pages for now, which would avoid the duplicate content until you are fully launched. Then you'd remove it and 301 redirect the old pages to the new.

          Just something you maybe want to think about! Hopefully your traffic diverter can handle this though. 🙂

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • STPseo
            STPseo @STPseo last edited by

            Thank you very much for the insight!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • FrankWickers
              FrankWickers @STPseo last edited by

              Ah ok. I understand now. I wasn't picking up on what you were saying before.

              If with the soft launch you are already putting the "new" version of the site on their intended final URLs then yes, you can let the engines start crawling those URLs. For each new URL you let the search engines crawl make sure to 301 its corresponding old URL (the old site) to the new version to minimize any duplicate content issues.

              If for whatever reason you can't quite 301 the old URLs yet (like if you still need instant access to reroute traffic back to them) you could try using rel=canonical on the old pages and point them to their new counter part only if the main content on each of the pages is almost exactly the same. You don't want Google to think you're manipulating them with rel=canonical.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • STPseo
                STPseo @STPseo last edited by

                Sorry this is so confusing and thank you so much for your responses... there would be no subdomain when we do the soft launch... it would be http://www.sierratradingpost.com/Mens-Clothing.html (old site) vs http://www.sierratradingpost.com/mens-clothing~d~15/ (new site)...

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • FrankWickers
                  FrankWickers @STPseo last edited by

                  As I'd said, there really isn't a reason to let them get a head start. The URL's will be changing when you transition the new site out of the subdomain (ie beta.sierratradingpost.com/mens vs sierratradingpost.com/mens - those are considered 2 completely different URLs) and the engines will have to recrawl all of the new pages at that point anyway.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • STPseo
                    STPseo @STPseo last edited by

                    We do plan to do that... it is just since we plan a soft launch we will essentially have 2 sites out there. We are wondering when to remove the noindex from the new site. We will have 2 sites for about a month... should we let the bots crawl the new site (new urls, same domain) only we we take down the old site and have the 301's or let Google crawl earlier to get the new site a head start on indexing.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • FrankWickers
                      FrankWickers @STPseo last edited by

                      And when you drop the sub domain you definitely want to 301 all of the old site structure's  URLs to their corresponding new page's URLs. That way nothing gets lost in the transition.

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • STPseo
                        STPseo @STPseo last edited by

                        We would drop the subdomain - so we would have 2 "Men's Clothing" department pages - different URLs, slightly different content...

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • FrankWickers
                          FrankWickers @STPseo last edited by

                          Yeah, just refer to our conversation above as I think it will pertain better to your situation.

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • FrankWickers
                            FrankWickers @STPseo last edited by

                            The only issue is that you have to keep in mind that Google/Bing defines pages on the internet through their URL's, not the content. The content only describes the pages.

                            So if you let the engines pre crawl the pages before dropping the subdomain - simply for the reason of letting them have a "sneak peek" - you won't really be doing yourself much of a favor, as the engines will just be recrawling the content on the non subdomain URL as if it were brand new anyway.

                            The reason to do it the pre crawl way would be if you're already building back links to the new beta pages. Then it could make sense to let the engines index those pages and 301 them to their new non subdomain versions later. In my opinion the benefit from this route would outweigh any potential duplicate content issues.

                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                            • STPseo
                              STPseo @STPseo last edited by

                              But the URL structer is different... does that matter?

                              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • FrankWickers
                                FrankWickers @STPseo last edited by

                                What YesBaby is talking about is somehting like Google's Website Optimizer. When someone goes to sierratradingpost.com/mens-stuff, for example, it will give 50% of the people the old version of the site for that page, and the other 50% the new version. It will eliminate any duplicate content issues as the 2 page variations will still be attached to the same exact URL.

                                Definitely a viable option if it fits with your game plan of how you want to do things.

                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • STPseo
                                  STPseo @STPseo last edited by

                                  SInce all of the URLs except for the homepage - what do you think about letting the new site get crawled maybe 2 weeks before it is 100% launched? We would have some duplicate content issues but I am hoping this would give us a head start with the new site.... then when we go 100% we add the 301's and new sitemap. It is my understanding we will be dropping the sub domain for the soft launch.

                                  Thank you so much!

                                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                  • FrankWickers
                                    FrankWickers @STPseo last edited by

                                    First of all - I love the new design. It looks great!

                                    The absolutel best way to go about it in my opinion would be to simply have the new site ready, and then launch it fully under the base domain (no subdomain) while 301 redirecting important old pages on the site to their related new versions. That way the search engine will have the easiest time of discovering the new site and indexing it, while making sure you don't lose anything in the transition via proper 301'ing.

                                    I can't say it would provide you with a massive benefit to set up a way for the search engines to start crawling the new site for now, as you're just going to be moving all of those URL's off of the subdomain in the near future anyway - where they will then need to be recrawled on the parent domain as if they were brand new.

                                    If the traffic diverter you have set up automatically 301's requests for old site pages to their new beta URL version then you might as well let those new versions be indexed for the time being. Just make sure that when you transfer the beta site to the parent domain that you 301 the old beta URL's to their new permanent home.

                                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                    • STPseo
                                      STPseo @YesBaby last edited by

                                      So with the service - the new site is not crawled until we launch it?

                                      FrankWickers STPseo 3 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                      • STPseo
                                        STPseo @FrankWickers last edited by

                                        The new site is beta.sierratradingpost.com where we will be dropping the beta. On the old one has catalog departments... ie Men's Classics, which, at this time, are not being carried over to the new site. I guess we are wonding when we should allow the robots to crawl the new site?

                                        FrankWickers STPseo Tom-Anthony 11 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                        • YesBaby
                                          YesBaby last edited by

                                          Hey Stephan,

                                          I'm assuming you want to measure how the traffic is converting on the new site, hence the strategy to send small portions of traffic to new pages?

                                          If so, the easiest way might to just straight up A/B split test the new pages with a service like Adobe/Omniture Test&Target. This doesn't cause any cloaking/dupe isseues. When you are happy with the results you can realese the site with all the 301's in place.

                                          STPseo 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                          • FrankWickers
                                            FrankWickers last edited by

                                            Let me make sure I have this straight... you're not going to be directing the new site format to a subdomain permanently, right? You were only using the sub domain for beta purposes?

                                            The way I see it, when I go to Sierra Trading Post's site now I can make out what looks like 2 different types of architecture structures. You have one link on the page pointing to Men's clothing which executes at a single defined .htm file. Then you can see that you have the "Men's Classics" (still general men's clothing?) which points to a directory which I'm guessing is your new site. Correct me if I'm wrong on this, or if I'm right but have the old vs. new reversed.

                                            If that is the case your best bet to try and minimalize any ranking impact would be to 301 redirect pages from the old catalog architecture to the new. That way you could remove the old site files completely and let the server take care of the direction.

                                            If you need to leave the old site up for throttling purposes like you said - you could use canoniclazation tags to refer the old pages to the new ones. That along with employing 301 tags would help train the search engines into understanding what you're doing.

                                            I'm sorry if I didn't answer your question as you needed. I'm still not sure if I understood your issue as intended. =P

                                            STPseo 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                            • 1 / 1
                                            • First post
                                              Last post

                                            Got a burning SEO question?

                                            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                                            Start my free trial


                                            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.

                                            • See all categories

                                            Related Questions

                                            • Markbwc

                                              New Subdomain & Best Way To Index

                                              We have an ecommerce site, we'll say at https://example.com. We have created a series of brand new landing pages, mainly for PPC and Social at https://sub.example.com, but would also like for these to get indexed. These are built on Unbounce so there is an easy option to simply uncheck the box that says "block page from search engines", however I am trying to speed up this process but also do this the best/correct way. I've read a lot about how we should build landing pages as a sub-directory, but one of the main issues we are dealing with is long page load time on https://example.com, so I wanted a kind of fresh start. I was thinking a potential solution to index these quickly/correctly was to make a redirect such as https://example.com/forward-1 -> https:sub.example.com/forward-1 then submit https://example.com/forward-1 to Search Console but I am not sure if that will even work. Another possible solution was to put some of the subdomain links accessed on the root domain say right on the pages or in the navigation. Also, will I definitely be hurt by 'starting over' with a new website? Even though my MozBar on my subdomain https://sub.example.com has the same domain authority (DA) as the root domain https://example.com? Recommendations and steps to be taken are welcome!

                                              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Markbwc
                                              0
                                            • ffctas

                                              Combining Two Sites With Similar Domain Authority

                                              Hello, We run two sites with the same product, product descriptions and url structure. Essentially, the two sites are the same except for domain name and minor differences on the home pages. We've run this way for quite a few years. Both sites have a domain authority of 48 and there are not a large number of duplicate incoming links. I understand the "book" to say we should combine the sites with 301's to the similar pages. I am concerned about doing this because "site 2" still does about 20% of our business. We have been losing organic traffic for a number of years. I think this mainly has to do with a more competitive environment. However, where google used to serve both our sites for a search term it now will only show one. How much organic benefit should we see if we combine. Will it be significant enough to merge the two sites. Understandably, I realize the future can't be predicted but I would like to know if anyone has had a similar experience or opinion Thanks

                                              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ffctas
                                              0
                                            • ims2016

                                              Should I run my Shopify store on a subdomain or buy a new domain for it?

                                              I'm planning to set up a subdomain for my Shopify store but I'm not sure if this is the right approach. Should I purchase a separate domain for it? I'm running Wordpress on my website and want to keep it that way. I want to use Shopify for the ecommerce side. I want to link the store from the top nav and of course I'll use CTA's in a variety of ways to point to merchandise and other things on the store side.   Thanks for any help you can offer.

                                              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ims2016
                                              0
                                            • Fulanito

                                              Move domain to new domain, for how much time should I keep forwarding?

                                              I'm not sure but my website looks like is not getting it's juice as supposed to be. As we already know, google preferred https sites and this is what happened to mine, it was been crawling as https but when the time came to move my domain to new domain, I used 301 or domain forwarding service, unfortunately they didn't have a way to forward from https to new https, they only had regular http to https, when users clicked to my old domain from google search my site was returned to "site does not exist", I used hreflang at least that google would detect my new domain been forwarding and yes it worked but now I'm wondering, for how much time should I keep the forwarding the old domain to the new one, my site looks like is not going up, I have changed all the external links, any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

                                              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fulanito
                                              1
                                            • NickG-123

                                              Site-wide Canonical Rewrite Rule for Multiple Currency URL Parameters?

                                              Hi Guys, I am currently working with an eCommerce site which has site-wide duplicate content caused by currency URL parameter variations. Example: https://www.marcb.com/ https://www.marcb.com/?setCurrencyId=3 https://www.marcb.com/?setCurrencyId=2 https://www.marcb.com/?setCurrencyId=1 My initial thought is to create a bunch of canonical tags which will pass on link equity to the core URL version. However I was wondering if there was a rule which could be implemented within the .htaccess file that will make the canonical site-wide without being so labour intensive. I also noticed that these URLs are being indexed in Google, so would it be worth setting a site-wide noindex to these variations also? Thanks

                                              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NickG-123
                                              0
                                            • McTaggart

                                              Image URLs - best practice

                                              Hi - I'm assuming image URL best practice follows same principles as non image URLs (not too many files and so on) - I notice alot of web devs putting photos in subdomains, so wonder if I'm missing something (I usually avoid subdomains like the plague)!

                                              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
                                              1
                                            • jcgoodrich

                                              Where is the best place to put a sitemap for a site with local content?

                                              I have a simple site that has cities as subdirectories (so URL is root/cityname). All of my content is localized for the city. My "root" page simply links to other cities. I very specifically want to rank for "topic" pages for each city and I'm trying to figure out where to put the sitemap so Google crawls everything most efficiently. I'm debating the following options, which one is better? Put the sitemap on the footer of "root" and link to all popular pages across cities. The advantage here is obviously that the links are one less click away from root. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" (e.g. root/cityname) and include all topics for that city. This is how Yelp does it. The advantage here is that the content is "localized" but the disadvantage is it's further away from the root. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" and include all topics across all cities. That way wherever Google comes into the site they'll be close to all topics I want to rank for. Thoughts? Thanks!

                                              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich
                                              0
                                            • GSI

                                              What is the best way to optimize/setup a teaser "coming soon" page for a new product launch?

                                              Within the context of a physical product launch what are some ideas around creating a /coming-soon page that "teases" the launch. Ideally I'd like to optimize a page around the product, but the client wants to try build consumer anticipation without giving too many details away. Any thoughts?

                                              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GSI
                                              0

                                            Get started with Moz Pro!

                                            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                                            Start my free trial
                                            Products
                                            • Moz Pro
                                            • Moz Local
                                            • Moz API
                                            • Moz Data
                                            • STAT
                                            • Product Updates
                                            Moz Solutions
                                            • SMB Solutions
                                            • Agency Solutions
                                            • Enterprise Solutions
                                            Free SEO Tools
                                            • Domain Authority Checker
                                            • Link Explorer
                                            • Keyword Explorer
                                            • Competitive Research
                                            • Brand Authority Checker
                                            • MozBar Extension
                                            • MozCast
                                            Resources
                                            • Blog
                                            • SEO Learning Center
                                            • Help Hub
                                            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                                            • How-to Guides
                                            • Moz Academy
                                            • API Docs
                                            About Moz
                                            • About
                                            • Team
                                            • Careers
                                            • Contact
                                            Why Moz
                                            • Case Studies
                                            • Testimonials
                                            Get Involved
                                            • Become an Affiliate
                                            • MozCon
                                            • Webinars
                                            • Practical Marketer Series
                                            • MozPod
                                            Connect with us

                                            Contact the Help team

                                            Join our newsletter
                                            Moz logo
                                            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                                            • Accessibility
                                            • Terms of Use
                                            • Privacy

                                            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.