Am I missing something if I absorb one site into another?
-
We are absorbing one of our sites into another and I want to make sure I am not missing anything. The site that is being absorbed will no longer exist as all the content has been replicated/duplicated on the main site.
About a month ago we added canonicals to all the duplicate content to point to the new site it will be a part of. That went very well and organic traffic continued to flow to those pages on the new site.
We recently (yesterday) used 301s on all the pages using mod_rewrites and redirected the domain name from the old site name to the new one. Using mod_rewrites we redirect any other page linking to that domain to www.newsite.com?ref=oldsite.com. So far I dont see anything coming in on an unexpected link.
I still need to tell Google via Webmaster Tools that the oldsite is now on newsite.com correct?
Is there anything else I might bump into that we havent thought of?
Thanks
-
I think WMT is sometimes annoying about it, but it makes sense. If you're pointing the whole site to a different site, I guess it makes sense that they want to verify you control the domain, and not just that one specific subdomain.
One other thing I would do is review your backlink profile - if there are some juicy links in there that you want to preserve and not lose some of their strength due to 301 depletion, I'd contact the webmasters and inform them of the change, asking them to update their links to the new URL to make sure you don't encounter any issues in the future.
-
Well, to help the situation. I tried to use WBT to redirect and got this error message.
We couldn't verify oldsite.com. To submit a change of address, oldsite.com must be verified using the same method as www.oldsite.com. Add oldsite.com to your account and verify ownership, then try again.
I had www.oldsite.com in WBT and used it fine all the time. Is it because my DNS has already taken over and it cant find the verification file on the oldsite?
Update, I was able to add a site in WBT for oldsite.com and verify it. Then I was able to move www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com (oldsite.com is also moved to www.newsite.com)
To move a site you need both www.site.com and site.com in WBT and verified? I did not know that.
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
-
Dev Site Was Indexed By Google
Two of our dev sites(subdomains) were indexed by Google. They have since been made private once we found the problem. Should we take another step to remove the subdomain through robots.txt or just let it ride out? From what I understand, to remove the subdomain from Google we would verify the subdomain on GWT, then give the subdomain it's own robots.txt and disallow everything. Any advice is welcome, I just wanted to discuss this before making a decision.
Technical SEO | | ntsupply0 -
Are multiple sites needed to rank one website?
My SEO guy for a mortgage website says that we should have 30 websites, with about 250 pages each on each site plus 50 blogs in order to even think of ranking for mortgage keywords. Is that correct?
Technical SEO | | simermeet0 -
Making one landing page rank higher than another
I have a website which uses an individual landing pages to greet traffic for each suburb in our service area. For a long time we had one landing page which covered a region of suburbs but we've since added individual pages for those suburbs as well. However, Google will always display results for the old regional page, even though the new pages are optimized for searches in that area. Is there anything I can do to get Google to display the pages I want?
Technical SEO | | mark.schad0 -
Moving an eCommerce Site to Wordpress
I'm evaluating moving an established eCommerce I own over to a WordPress based site with a woocommerce plugin. My question is, does the added /category/ slug hurt SEO rankings at all?
Technical SEO | | CobraJones950 -
Can we use our existing site content on new site?
We added 1000s of pages unique content on our site and soon after google release penguin and we loose our ranking for major keywords and after months of efforts we decided to start a new site. If we use all the existing site content on new domain does google going to penalized the site for duplicate content or it will be treated as unique? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mozfreak0 -
Should Canonical be used if your site does not have any duplicate
Should canonical be used site wide even if my site is solid no duplicate content is generated. please explain your answer
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
301 redirects & merging two sites into one
We have a client that has two sites that rank well for different searches in their market. The main pages ranking are things like advice articles and news pieces. For various reasons, they just want one site. I believe they need to duplicate the content from the outgoing site and place it on the main site, with a 301 redirect from each old page to each new one. What happens when they eventually want to redirect the entire domain? Would these smaller, internal redirects become obsolete, therefore removing any link value they once had? I am not sure how this works or if there is a best practice way to do this. Thanks Gareth
Technical SEO | | Gmorgan0 -
Site Structure question
when deciding the Site structure for a e-commerce site Is it better to keep everything mysite.com/widget.html or use categories like mysite.com/Gifts/widget.html
Technical SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0