Moving content
-
I have www.SiteA.com which contains a number of sections of content, a section of which (i.e. www.SiteA.com/sectionA), we would like to move to a new domain www.SiteB.com
Definitely we will ensure that a redirect strategy is in place and that we submit a sitemap for SiteB
Three Questions
1. Anything else I am missing from the migration plan?
2. Since we are only moving part of SiteA to SiteB, is there another way of telling Google that we changed address for that section or are the 301s enough?
3. Currently, Section A (under SiteA) contains a subsection where we were posting an article a day. In the new site (SiteB), we decided to drop this subsection and write content (but not "exactly" the same content) under a new section.
During migration, how should we handle the subsection that we have decided to stop writing?
Should we:
A. Import the content into SiteB and call it archives and then redirect all the urls from subsection under SiteA to the archives under SiteB?
OR
B. Do not move the content but redirect all the pages (365 in total) to where we think the user would be more interested in going to on SiteB?
Note: A colleague of mine is worried that since the subsection has good content he thinks its necessary to actually move the content to SiteB. But again, looking at the views for the archives it caters for 1% of the the total views of this section. In other words, people only view the article on the day it is written.
I hope I was clear
Your help is appreciated
Thank you
-
When moving content to a new site, I feel it is important to move as much as you can and leave little behind if you want all your pages to rank the same. The problem with moving pages and content is all the INTERNAL links, title tags, etc that make the website rank. It is much easier to delete pages after the whole website is moved. It very hard to put back all the Internal links and title tags. Yet these elements are critical to how people navigate your site and how google looks at the way you have supported the information on your website by linking to additional internal content relative to any particular page. In most cases if a website is ranking for multiple keywords in their business niche deleting any of the old pages, is just not necessary and may be harmful, until that page becomes a 'problem' to ranking, bad links to it, or simply not indexed anymore. Remember it is a counting game for most Internal links. So having 50 old pages linking to a new upper level and visible page, you want to rank, is very helpful. Even if the content is not something you want visitors to find, it is easy to leave the old content out of direct navigation on the new site so the only people that see it are from searches anyway and will be a small number of people. Everyone wants only high ranking pages, optimized to rank for particular keywords but that is rarely what happens. And google knows this, so having a mixture of poor pages and great pages actually will keep you from any negative points with google.
-
Thank you for your reply regarding (3).
So if
1. We think its of no more value to the visitor. (the unique views for the archives count for less than 1% of the viewed content)
2. It's time sensitive content i.e. content that is written about situations of the day
3. We have decided not to continue writing under this section any more on the new website
Do you think it still makes sense to import such content? My only problem is how google will perceive the fact that 360 pages will drop off from the current site it is on and not even be present on the new site.
This is tricky because really we are doing two things:
1. Migrating to a new domain a big part of a section from the current domain and 2. we are looking at how we can better streamline/improve content.
Maybe it just makes sense to import everything we have from the old domain and then after we successfully launch the new site, we look at how we can better streamline/improve content
-
301 redirects are the way to go.
It won't hurt to import the content if it is of value to the clients, the reality is you will 301 redirect each page-by-page so it would make sense to have the content from prior.
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
-
Content Issues: Duplicate Content
Hi there
Technical SEO | | Kingagogomarketing
Moz flagged the following content issues, the page has duplicate content and missing canonical tags.
What is the best solution to do? Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/industrial-flooring/ Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/index.php/industrial-flooring Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/index.php/industrial-flooring/0 -
Duplicate Content
I am trying to get a handle on how to fix and control a large amount of duplicate content I keep getting on my Moz Reports. The main area where this comes up is for duplicate page content and duplicate title tags ... thousands of them. I partially understand the source of the problem. My site mixes free content with content that requires a login. I think if I were to change my crawl settings to eliminate the login and index the paid content it would lower the quantity of duplicate pages and help me identify the true duplicate pages because a large number of duplicates occur at the site login. Unfortunately, it's not simple in my case because last year I encountered a problem when migrating my archives into a new CMS. The app in the CMS that migrated the data caused a large amount of data truncation Which means that I am piecing together my archives of approximately 5,000 articles. It also means that much of the piecing together process requires me to keep the former app that manages the articles to find where certain articles were truncated and to copy the text that followed the truncation and complete the articles. So far, I have restored about half of the archives which is time-consuming tedious work. My question is if anyone knows a more efficient way of identifying and editing duplicate pages and title tags?
Technical SEO | | Prop650 -
Mobile website content optimisation
Hi there, someone I know is going to put their site to a mobile version with a mobile sub domain (m.). I have recommended responsive but for now this is their only way forward to cope with the 21st April update by Google. My question is what is the best practice for content, as its a different url will there need to be a canonical tag in to stop duplication and thus being penalised from the Google panda update? Any advice much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | tdigital0 -
Duplicate content question...
I have a high duplicate content issue on my website. However, I'm not sure how to handle or fix this issue. I have 2 different URLs landing to the same page content. http://www.myfitstation.com/tag/vegan/ and http://www.myfitstation.com/tag/raw-food/ .In this situation, I cannot redirect one URL to the other since in the future I will probably be adding additional posts to either the "vegan" tag or the "raw food tag". What is the solution in this case? Thank you
Technical SEO | | myfitstation0 -
Why are some pages now duplicate content?
It is probably a silly question, but all of a sudden, the following pages of one of my clients are reported as Duplicate content. I cannot understand why. They weren't before... http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/mediterranea-halal
Technical SEO | | MarketingEnergy
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/gyros-halal
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/döner-halal
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/vegetariana
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/seizoen-pizza-estate
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/contadina
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/4-stagioni
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/shoarma Thanks for any help in the right direction 🙂 | |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| | <colgroup><col style="mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 17225; width: 353pt;" width="471"></colgroup>
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/mediterranea-halal |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/gyros-halal |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/döner-halal |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/vegetariana |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/seizoen-pizza-estate |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/contadina |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/4-stagioni |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/shoarma |0 -
Category URL Duplicate Content
I've recently been hired as the web developer for a company with an existing web site. Their web architecture includes category names in product urls, and of course we have many products in multiple categories thus generating duplicate content. According to the SEOMoz Site Crawl, we have roughly 1600 pages of duplicate content, I expect primarily from this issue. This is out of roughly 3600 pages crawled. My questions are: 1. Fixing this for the long term will obviously mean restructuring the URLs for the site. Is this worthwhile and what will the ramifications be of performing such a move? 2. How can I determine the level and extent of the effects of this duplicated content? 3. Is it possible the best course of action is to do nothing? The site has many, many other issues, and I'm not sure how highly to prioritize this problem. In addition, the IT man is highly doubtful this is causing an SEO issue, and I'm going to need to be able to back up any action I request. I do feel I will need to strongly justify any possible risks this level of site change could cause. Thanks in advance, and please let me know if any more information is needed.
Technical SEO | | MagnetsUSA0 -
I am Posting an article on my site and another site has asked to use the same article - Is this a duplicate content issue with google if i am the creator of the content and will it penalize our sites - or one more than the other??
I operate an ecommerce site for outdoor gear and was invited to guest post on a popular blog (not my site) for a trip i had been on. I wrote the aritcle for them and i also will post this same article on my website. Is this a dup content problem with google? and or the other site? Any Help. Also if i wanted to post this same article to 1 or 2 other blogs as long as they link back to me as the author of the article
Technical SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Blocking AJAX Content from being crawled
Our website has some pages with content shared from a third party provider and we use AJAX as our implementation. We dont want Google to crawl the third party's content but we do want them to crawl and index the rest of the web page. However, In light of Google's recent announcement about more effectively indexing google, I have some concern that we are at risk for that content to be indexed. I have thought about x-robots but have concern about implementing it on the pages because of a potential risk in Google not indexing the whole page. These pages get significant traffic for the website, and I cant risk. Thanks, Phil
Technical SEO | | AU-SEO0