Site changes lead to big questions
-
I'm making some changes to my business that will cause me to move my blog to a new domain. The existing site will serve as a sales campaign for our full service programs and I want to keep visitors focused on that campaign. The old site will serve much like a mini site with a sales letter and video sales letter.
In moving the blog content to another page - I found a post from Rand from a few years ago http://www.seomoz.org/blog/expectations-and-best-practices-for-moving-to-or-launching-a-new-domain.
The way I wanted to approach this was to remove the content from the old site, and then resubmit the site map to Google for indexing. Of course they'll notice that the blog pages are gone. (probably a load of 404's)
After perhaps a week, I'd repost the content (about 50 posts) on the new domain, which will be little more than a blog.
I'd like some input on the way to approach this. Should I...
a) Follow Rand's formula?
b) Go with my idea (sort of the brute force model)?
c) Consider an alternative method?
It's probably worth mentioning that none of these posts have high search engine rankings.
I appreciate your input Mozzers!
-
I read back over what Rand posted over 5 years ago! I have moved several sites and what Rand said is still best practice. Google indexing is nothing to play with. Taking down content and then trying to get it to rank again can look very spammy to Google.
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
-
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 -
To redirect or not to redirect, that is the question
I work for a software company that is redeveloping the website (same domain.) We have tons of content in the form of articles and documents for support, how to use the product better, case studies, and blog posts. I've downloaded a landing page report and many of these have low impressions and little or no clicks (some ranked high other very low.) Should I redirect all this content to the new site where some of it won't exist or forget about it because of the lack of juice? Is there a rule-of-thumb threshold for redirecting for content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody15969167212220 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
Need to shorten and change site-wide meta titles (50.000 pages). OK to do all at once?
Just noticed that google completely screws up our meta titles in the SERPs. Google decided to show titles which are not understandable to visitors and worst of all even shows titles in different languages than the actual page. The words of the displayedf titles are nowhere on the page (actually they are parts of old title tags that we stopped using 6 months ago and that we used on different pages). Pages are crawled weekly. All our meta titles are a bit longer than the 70 character limit, so I plan to rephrase and shorten them so that they are all max. 66 characters. Dynamically we choose different variations of title texts based on character length of keywords. Having titles that fit into SERPs without cutting are supposed to have less probability to be changed by google. I heard some people reporting loss of rankings after site-wide meta title changes. Especially since we changed title tags sitewide already about 6 months ago I am a bit concerned. How would you proceed? Just do the site-wide change all at once?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
$1,500 question
I have $1,500 to spend to promote 8 years old website. Almost no SEO work was done for the site in the past 3-4 years. The site has a couple hundreds (around 300) external backlinks pointing to the homepage, and around 30 backlinks pointing to internal pages. It gets around 60% traffic from referring sites, 30% direct, and 10% from SE. The homepage has PR 4. It ranks around 70th place in Google rankings for one of the main keywords. No keyword research has been done for the site. Looking for long term benefits. What would be the best way, in your opinion, to spend this money?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _Z_0 -
On-Site Optimization Tips for Job site?
I am working on a job site that only ranks well for the homepage with very low ranking internal pages. My job pages do not rank what so ever and are database driven and often times turn to 404 pages after the job has been filled. The job pages have to no content either. Anybody have any technical on-site recommendations for a job site I am working on especially regarding my internal pages? (Cross Country Allied.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0 -
Scapers and Other Sites Outranking
Post panda, there is definitely more talk about scrapers or other (more authoritative) sites outranking the original content creators in the SERPS. The most common way this problem is addressed (from what I've seen) is by rewriting the content and try your hardest to be the first one to be indexed or just ignoring it from an on page standpoint and do more link dev. Does anyone have any advice on the best way to address? Should site owners be looking deeper into their analytics and diagnostics before doing the rewrites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Troyville0