Merged websites issue
-
Hi
Before my time, company big.com took over company small.com.
They decided to replicate big.com web pages onto small.com - so both websites have identical pages and copy, just different domains.
Within the small.com sitmap.xml they list only big.com urls.
They are also using big.com google analytics tracking code on small.com.
I have no idea what happened to the original content on small.com or if they put 301 redirects on.
I am thinking: do a 301 redirect on small domain to big domain. A) Agree?
Small domain is likely to have valuable historic inbound links which are now going to 404 pages.
After I do the 301 should these then appear in big.com SEOMoz campaign and on big.com webmaster tool for me to fix? B) Views?
Or should I get up webmaster tool on small.com and fix that first? C) Views?
Many thanks in advance guys, sorry its a long statement!
Richard
-
Hi Ben & Robert
Many thanks again.
I have now found at least two more websites the big company has done this on ie ditched the original small company web pages and content for a copy of the Big company web pages content.
In each case the small company sitemap.xml lists the big company pages BUT many of those are wrong URLS.
I think I'll take my time on this....
Cheers
Richard
-
Richard,
Remember, first I said wait.
Look at what Ben says here. He is correct (except on domain 301). You have enough weight that you do want to move it if at all possible. If it is a thousand pages, I would at least pick my strongest and get them 301'd.
Be methodical.
Use the correct urls from small to go to large.
Homepage to homepage will only help with homepage.You cannot do domain to domain, even in .htaccess. Here is a source: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
You have to direct url to url. If you were simply setting the www. to non, etc. yes that can be done.
Hope it helps you out,
-
I would say that redirecting has value with that amount of domain authority. A redirect would make use of the weight acquired, switching it off would lose all of this completely.
If you are worried about the amount of work involved in matching old to new URL then you always have the option to redirect to homepage. This will still pass on the weight to the site although not as effectively.
How many URLs are we talking about?
Also I'm pretty sure you can do a domain replacement via .htaccess without having to do individual 301's - can someone correct me if this isn't the case?
-
Hi Robert, many thanks for taking the time to write a reply (and to Ben to)
Re your points, I have only just started with BIG company.
Your 'before and after' is how I assume it was. They must have done then change about 7 months ago.
I tired Archive.org but nothing much indexed and has redirects on it. Both websites had a legal notice overlay appear that had to be accepted before seeing the content.
On small.com the sitemap.xml is listing all the big URLs, its using 0.9.
OSE has approx 40 inbound links from sites with 20-30 page authority and 30-40 domain authority.
I will try Xenu link sleuth as you mention (I'll dig out my old Windows PC first!)
I suspect as you mentioned in the caveat, might be better to just turn off small!
Many thanks again
Richard
-
Richard,
One question is how long ago was before your time?????
That will be a factor in all of this. Next, Advice:
Do nothing first. Sit for a moment and develop a Plan. Find out where you are on the map before you take off to another direction. Know the variables.
So that we may understand:
Before you had and you hadSitesmall.com/pg1 SITEBIG.com/pgA
Sitesmall.com/pg2 SITEBIG.com/pgB
Sitesmall.com/pg3 SITEBIG.com/płC up until highly successful BIG bought up and comer small.
Each site had separate sitemap, content, urls, GA tracking code.
Then you had:
Sitesmall.com/pgA SITEBIG.com/pgA
Sitesmall.com/pgB SITEBIG.com/pgB
Sitesmall.com/pgC SITEBIG.com/pgC and this was simply because someone changed all on Sitesmall to look and feel identical to SITEBIG?
I cannot understand how you have a SITEBIG.com sitemap for Sitesmall with BIG urls? Are you simply saying the domain is different but url sub directories are the same on sitemap? Are they following 0.9 from Sitemaps.org? Otherwise I cannot see how this is constructed. (Look at Sitemaps info in GWMT)
As to GA code being the same, have you looked at analytics on both and does it make any sense? Have you looked for occurrence of GA code in other places (head and body, etc.) on both sites?
FIRST THE BIG CAVEAT: you may save yourself a ton of work, trouble, and time... by turning off sitesmall.com and going to work on SITEBIG.com....... get it SEO perfect using all the time this will take.
On the historic, I would go to archive.org and see what is there using wayback machine. Look at what was there - when. So if the old site was six months ago, you at least know where you are reaching to and can look at old urls.
On the, did they 301? I would first for ease of looking put current homepage url in OSE and see if it says anything about redirecting. Then I would run the whole thing through Xenu link sleuth to see what is/ is not there. So Sitesmall.com then SITEBIG.com run both and see what you will see. Lot of answers there. Response codes, etc. I do not think you will find 301's as the way they changed the urls would not seem to make sense for same.
You can look to see if they used 301's in the .htaccess file, but I do not believe you will find them.
Once I knew what I was dealing with only then would I develop a plan.
Assuming SiteSmall had some Auth, PR, links, etc. and some of that still existed, I would begin the redirect plan. In the SEOmoz search bar I would place the query How to use 301 redirect? You will find a wealth of information. There are also numerous sites with code laid out, etc. in a simple search query online.
Note, I would not be using 301 of current to current as that is without value. You have to try and reconstruct old to new. Real Sitesmall.com to SITEBIG.com as it is now. Remember this is not a .com to .com redirect as that does not work. 301's are url to url. You need to know what the url was with the juice and use it.
For GA code, I would definitely change it prior to 301 if you can get it to old that might help.
This is the way to clean up the site duplication, capture a bit of juice, and possibly correct a mistake.
Hopefully, given there are some unanswered questions from what you stated, this is still helpful.
For your A. As per above.
B. Read above
C. Read above
Best
-
Hi Richard,
My thoughts would initially be:
a) yes a 301 redirect is probably the best way to avoid the duplicated pages and pass the weight on
b) if you have 301 redirected them they won't be 404 errors, the weight of the previous URLs will be passed on (although there is a slight decay factor involved with redirects so you won't get 100% of the weight)
c) I can't see how there will be too many errors as long as you 301 small.com to big.com sitewide. If anything big.com should get a boost from any links that the small.com pages had. Also this should help clear up the duplicate content issues.
Hope that helps,
Ben
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
-
Advanced popup for WP website
Hi guys, I'm looking for advanced popup for WP website.
Moz Pro | | EdmondHong87
Im looking something with advanced filters. For example: Filter the visitors by the operation system (For mobile).Will show to new visitors, but exclude to returns visitors.
Will exclude visitors that sign up to the website.
Filter the traffic...Popup will show only to visitors from FB, Google organic etc... Well, i believe that you understand what i need...
Anyone know something like this ? Thank you!0 -
Google has a penalty on my website? How to resolve?
I recently purchases Moz pro, hoping to find out why my website isn't ranking on specific keywords. I'm done analytics on myself and my competition and it seems that I rank better than them on 95% of the categories (using OpenSiteExplorer and keyword research tools). So I purchases Moz Pro hoping I'd find the glaring error in my ways. I found a few small issues I was having, and have dealt with them. Overall however, they were small issues, and have led me to believe Google as a penalty in place for my website (SEO friend have also suspected this). In my Google Webmaster tools, nothing is marked under Manual Actions. So does anyone have a way to contact Google and have them directly look at my website to insure there is no errors in their system?
Moz Pro | | ZSuttonPhoto10 -
Search issues
I often use the search tool to give comparisons from 1 company to another and recently have found it not working very well, i am constantly refreshing as it has the circle whirling round for many minutes at a time, it often brings up the results of searches I did earlier in the day or even the day before, and the overall time that it takes to bring up the information I have requested seems to be getting longer and longer. Now working in a face paced environment this can often loose an hour of my time each day just waiting on information that I have already entered several times. I feel that the quality of the service has just slowed down so much that I am now looking at other companies/tools to gain the same information, is there anything that has happened on your side recently that has caused this issue? are other users experiencing the same issue? is there anything that can be addressed to resolve this issue. Kind regards Michael Beardsell
Moz Pro | | zenwebsol0 -
Issue: Title Element Too Long !
hello , i found this issue in seomoz campaigns. i see many links blocked by google for this reason . but something wrong here for example i see this link like that in seomoz dashboard Wagdy Hassan, Author at Seo Seek : Seo Tutorials , Seo Tools , Make Money Online http://seo-seek.com/author/wagdys/ and its already not in google. but when i open the link http://seo-seek.com/author/wagdys/ the title is " Wagdy Hassan " i fixed it 6 days ago. what is wrong with the site? also i still waiting google to put the new results .. wait for your answer, Thanks 🙂
Moz Pro | | Wagdys0 -
Its been over a month, rogerbot hasn't crawled the entire website yet. Any ideas?
Rogerbot has stopped crawling the website at 308 pages past week and has not crawled the website with over 1000+ pages. Any ideas on what I can do to get this fixed & crawling?
Moz Pro | | TejaswiNaidu0 -
Only few pages (308 pages of 1000 something pages) have been crawled and diagnosed in 4 days, how many days till the entire website is crawled complete?
Setup campaign about 4-5 days ago and yesterday rogerbot said 308 pages were crawled and the diagnostics were provided. This website has over 1000+ pages and would like to know how long it would take for roger to crawl the entire website and provide diagnostics. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | TejaswiNaidu0 -
Google Analytic Caching Issue?
Two weeks ago, I started testing a campaign and linked it to my Google analytics account. At the time there were 4 domains linked to the GA account. And I could see all 4 domains at the drop down menu that asked me to choose one to connect to. One week ago, I added a 5 more domains to GA. When I log directly into GA, I see the total of all 9 domains, and all are verified and collecting data. Today at pro seomoz I started a new campaign, for one of the new domains recently added to GA. When I try to connect the campaign to GA, only the ORIGINAL 4 domains are visible on the drop down menu. None of the 5 new domains are visible. So I am unable to connect to the new domain. At campaign settings, I disconnected from GA, and connected again, but could not see the new domains on the drop down menu. I tried to use both FF and IE. I can only assume that this is a caching issue at pro.seomoz. If so, how to flush cache and get current again. Please advise
Moz Pro | | microonae0 -
Issue with temporary redirects
I have an issue with my temporary redirects. The seomoz campaign is showing many pages are redirecting to the homepage. However, the pages it identifies are old pages and have been deleted and are not on the sitemap. How do i solve this?
Moz Pro | | CompleteOffice0