New Website, New URL, New Content - What do we do with the old site? Are 301's the only option?
-
We've just built a new site for a client. They were adamant on changing the url. The new site is entirely new content, however the subject mater is the same. Some pages are even titled very similarly.
Is is advisable to keep the old site running, and link it to the new site? Permanently, or temporarily?
Do we simply place redirects from the old site the new? Old site was 30 pages, new site is 80 pages. So redirects won't be available to all the new pages.
It seems a shame to trash the old site, it is getting some good traffic, and the content - although outdated is unique and of a high quality.
Old url is 4+ yrs old, the new url is new.
Some enlightened opinions would be greatly welcomed.
Thanks
-
Personally I would try to use all the old content & try to keep the urls (if not duplicate) and put a 301 redirect on the old website, hopefully will be indexed well and not lose that traffic.
-
Hello Luke,
If I had to make the call, I'd 301 redirect the relevant old pages to the corresponding new pages. I'd also tell Google that you've updated your web address using GWT. Obviously there's not much you can do with the new pages that don't have relevant old pages, so just leave those to be indexed as normal.
Thanks!
Ryan
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
-
Delete old blog posts after 301 redirects to new pages?
Hi Moz Community, I've recently created several new pages on my site using much of the same copy from blog posts on the same topics (we did this for design flexibility and a few other reasons). The blogs and pages aren't exactly identical, as the new pages have much more content, but I don't think there's a point to having both and I don't want to have duplicate content, so we've used 301 redirects from the old blog posts to the new pages of the same topic. My question is: can I go ahead and delete the old blog posts? (Or would there be any reasons I shouldn't delete them?) I'm guessing with the 301 redirects, all will be well in the world and I can just delete the old posts, but I wanted to triple check to make sure. Thanks so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it!
Technical SEO | | TaraLP1 -
If I'm using a compressed sitemap (sitemap.xml.gz) that's the URL that gets submitted to webmaster tools, correct?
I just want to verify that if a compressed sitemap file is being used, then the URL that gets submitted to Google, Bing, etc and the URL that's used in the robots.txt indicates that it's a compressed file. For example, "sitemap.xml.gz" -- thanks!
Technical SEO | | jgresalfi0 -
Strange URL redirecting to my new site
Hi all, I recently relaunched a site on a brand new URL - www.boardwarehouse.co.uk. I've spent the last couple of weeks building some backlinks as well as developing a basic content strategy. We've started ranking for a few of our less competitive keywords which is great, however there's a strange site which either redirects or is mirroring our content. I'm at a complete loss as to what's causing this to happen and what i can do to stop it. On the attachment - my content is top and second. The fourth result is the offending site. Any help/ advice would be most helpful! Thanks in advance, Alick 0BSyNn6
Technical SEO | | Alick3000 -
Can new content be added to a url which has a 301 redirect?
I am working on a site which is currently being redesigned. The home page currently ranks highly for relevant search terms, although on the new site the content on this page will be removed. The solution I was considering, to preserve rankings, was to move the content on the home page to a new url, and use a 301 redirect to help preserve rankings for that particular page. The question I have therefore, is am I able to add new content to the home page, and have this page freshly indexed accordingly? Any thoughts or suggestions would be most welcome. Thanks, Matt.
Technical SEO | | MatthewA0 -
Friendly URLs for MultiLingual Site
Hi, We have a multilingual website with both latin and non-latin characters, We are working on creating a friendly URL structure for the site. For the Latin languages can we use translated version of the URLs within the language folders? For example - www.site/cars www.site/fr/voitures www.site/es/autos
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
301 Redirecting weird URLs with % in them
I've been working on redirecting links reported as 404 in Google webmaster tools. I've stumbled upon 41 URLs that Google is reporting as 404 that include a '%' in the URL, but I don't know how to redirect. Here is an example: URL: bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ Attempted redirect: redirect 301 /bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ http://www.mysite.com/ Unfortunately, after implementing the redirect, http://www.mysite.com/bond_information.htm%20Surety%20Bond%20Information,%20with%20FAQ still resolves a 404 error. Anyone successfully fix these errors using Apache .htaccess?
Technical SEO | | TheDude0 -
How Best to Handle 'Site Jacking' (Unauthorized Use of Someone else's Dedicated IP Address)
Anyone can point their domain to any IP address they want. I've found at least two domains (same owner) with two totally unrelated domains (to each other and to us) that are currently pointing their domains to our IP address. The IP address is on our dedicated server (we control the entire physical server) and is exclusive to only that one domain (so it isn't a virtual hosting misconfiguration issue) This has caused Google to index their two domains with duplicate content from our site (found by searching for site:www.theirdomain.com) Their site does not come up in the first 50 results though for any of the keywords we come up for so Google obviously knows THEY are the dupe content, not us (our site has been around for 12 years - much longer than them.) Their registration is private and we have not been able to contact these people. I'm not sure if this is just a mistake on the DNS for the two domains or it is someone doing this intentionally to try to harm our ranking. It has been going on for a while, so it is most likely not a mistake for two live sites as they would have noticed long ago they were pointing to the wrong IP. I can think of a variety of actions to take but I can find no information anywhere regarding what Google officially recommends doing in this situation, assuming you can't get a response. Here's my ideas. a) Approach it as a Digital Copyright Violation and go through the lengthy process of having their site taken down. Pro: Eliminates the issue. Con: Sort of a pain and we could be leaving possibly some link juice on the table? b) Modify .htaccess to do a 301 redirect from any URL not using our domain, to our domain. This means Google is going to see several domains all pointing to the same IP and all except our domain, 301 redirecting to our domain. Not sure if THAT will harm (or help) us? Would we not receive link juice then from any site out there that was linking to these other domains? Con: Google will see the context of the backlinks and their link text will not be related at all to our site. In addition, if any of these other domains pointing to our IP have backlinks from 'bad neighborhoods' I assume it could hurt us? c) Modify .htaccess to do a 404 File Not Found or 403 forbidden error? I posted in other forums and have gotten suggestions that are all over the map. In many cases the posters don't even understand what I'm talking about - thinking they are just normal backlinks. Argh! So I'm taking this to "The Experts" on SEOMoz.
Technical SEO | | jcrist1