What do I do with an old site when a new one is built?
-
I have a customer that has a PR 4 website with over 3000 pages of content. He decided to build a brand new website with a new domain and it now has a PR of 2. Our question is, what do we do with the old site? Do we migrate all the content over to the new site and do redirects on all the pages? Do we keep the old site up and put links over to the new site? He was just planning on shutting it down but that seemed like a complete waste of PR and SEO. What is his best course of action? Thanks for your replies.
-
You should also set up Google Webmaster Tools for your old and new domains and then tell Google about your change of address. Log-in then go to Configuration>Change of Address
And here is some other information from Google that is useful to follow https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105
-
I agree 100% with your answer, checking where most of your backlinks are coming from is very important and changing them to your new website shouldn't be a problem; as well as do look at the deep links and redirect them to the new website as well.
-
Move whatever content makes sense and do 301 redirects. If there's no reason for that content to be there and if it's not bringing in any traffic, or if it is, either wya, it makes complete sense to move/migrate content that's relevant and then do 301's. Make sure you check where most of your backlinks are coming from and if you can get any of those links changed to the new website. I would also check for deep links to the old site and make sure, whatever URL those deep links were going to, are redirected to the new page on the new site. I hope this helps.
-
Hi. I am not a developer, so I can't give you an in-depth answer except to say that you absolutely must implement 301 redirects from your old pages to new in order to maintain your link equity from the old site. If you need more information on how to do this, let me know and I can get the required info.
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
-
We are migrating a site and are seeing alot of 301s and 302s already in the old site is it ok to leave those as is?
For the 3xx’s I’m not sure if it’s okay for us to redirect to these so please advise on that
Technical SEO | | lina_digital0 -
What to do with old conversion pages
Hey folks! I have a ton of old conversion pages from past trade shows, old webinars, etc that are either getting no traffic or very little. Wondering if I should just 404 them out? Here's an example: http://marketing.avidxchange.com/rent-manager-user-conference-demo-request-2015 For the pages getting traffic (from PPC, referral links, organic) my presumption is to keep those. The only problem is we have multiple instances of the same asset (prior marketers would just clone them for different campaigns), so in those cases should I 301 them to one version? Looking for advice on best practices here for future instances. Such as future trade shows, after we use the conversion pages at an event, should I just delete/404 them? Cleaning up old pages should I just delete/404? They don't have any value really and they're annoying to have hanging around. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Bill_King0 -
Our client's site was owned by former employee who took over the site. What should be done? Is there a way to preserve all the SEO work?
A client had a member of the team leave on bad terms. This wasn't something that was conveyed to us at all, but recently it came up when the distraught former employee took control of the domain and locked everyone out. At first, this was assumed to be a hack, but eventually it was revealed that one of the company starters who unhappily left the team owned the domain all along and is now holding it hostage. Here's the breakdown: -Every page aside from the homepage is now gone and serving a 404 response code -The site is out of our control -The former employee is asking for a $1 million ransom to sell the domain back -The homepage is a "countdown clock" that isn't actively counting down, but claims that something exciting is happening in 3 days and lists a contact email. The question is how we can save the client's traffic through all this turmoil. Whether buying a similar domain and starting from square one and hoping we can later redirect the old site's pages after getting it back. Or maybe we have a legal claim here that we do not see even though the individual is now the owner of the site. Perhaps there's a way to redirect the now defunct pages to a new site somehow? Any ideas are greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Site-wide Links
Hey y'all, I know this question has been asked many times before but I wanted to see what your stance was on this particular case. The organisation I work for is a group of 12 companies - each with its own website. On some of the sites we have a link to the other sites within the group on every single page of that site. Our organic search traffic has dropped a bit but not significantly and we haven't received any manual penalties from Google. It's also worth mentioning that the referral traffic for these sites from the other sites I control is quite good and the bounce rate is extremely low. If you were in my shoes would you remove the links, put a nofollow tag on the links or leave the links as they are? Thanks guys 🙂
Technical SEO | | AAttias0 -
Changed URL of all web pages to a new updated one - Keywords still pick the old URL
A month ago we updated our website and with that we created new URLs for each page. Under "On-Page", the keywords we put to check ranking on are still giving information on the old urls of our websites. Slowly, some new URLs are popping up. I'm wondering if there's a way I can manually make the keywords feedback information from the new urls.
Technical SEO | | Champions0 -
Want to Target Mobile site for Google Mobile Version and Desktop Site for Google Desktop Version
I have ecommerce site with both mobile version and desktop version. Mobile version starts with m.example.com and full version starts with www.example.com I am using same content through out both site and using 301 redirection by detecting user agent vice-versa. My both sites are accessible to crawl by any google spider. I have submitted both sites's sitemap to GWT and mobile site having mobile sitemap xml, so google can easily recognize my mobile site. Is it going to help to rank my both sites as per my expectation? I need to rank for mobile site in Google mobile and ranking for desktop site in Google desktop version. Some of pages of my mobile site are started to appearing in Google desktop version. So how I can stop them to appear in Google desktop? Your comments are highly welcome.
Technical SEO | | Hexpress0 -
Too many links on my site
Hi there everybody, I am a total SEO newbie and i am burning with questions. I had my site crawled and found out that it contains too many links. The reason is that it is a site where I constantly write news and articles and each one of them is a new Joomla item, thus a new link. I actually thought lots of content is good for SEO. How am I supposed to reduce the link amount?
Technical SEO | | polyniki0 -
New Ecom Category
Hello, I'd like to create a new category for my store. All products will be from other categories, no new products will be added. So this is really content that is already on my site. I will add cateogry specific text in this page with unique title, etc. But the products are all already on my site.Is this duplicate content, will this be a bad move? Thanks
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0
