Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Moving Content To Another Website With No Redirect?
-
I've got a website that has lots of valuable content and tools but it's been hit too hard by both Panda and Penguin. I came to the conclusion that I'd be better off with a new website as this one is going to hell no matter how much time and money I put in it. Had I started a new website the first time it got hit by Penguin, I'd be profitable today.
I'd like to move some of that content to this other domain but I don't want to do 301 redirects as I don't want to pass bad link juice. I know I'll lose all links and visitors to the original website but I don't care.
My only concern is duplicate content. I was thinking of setting the pages to noindex on the original website and wait until they don't appear in Google's index. Then I'd move them over to the new domain to be indexed again.
Do you see any problem with this? Should I rewrite everything instead? I hate spinning content...!
-
If we're understanding the situation correctly, I'd say this sums it up pretty well.
-
It sounds to me as though most of the content from old site is staying but that 3 enigmatic 'tools' are being moved to a new domain.
In which case I would want to be sure that the functionality being moved wasn't the cause of the previously lifted penalty, especially from a Panda perspective (given that the tools on the new domain presumably won't have any links pointing to it, Penguin shouldn't be an issue) - as a penalty would be re-applied if the tools are not Panda-friendly.
So:
- if you want to have the tools on both sites, I'm with Pete - noindex the tools on the old site.
- if you are permanently moving the tools, review them for Panda-friendliness and then noindex the old site's URLs, probably worth blocking the old URL in robots.txt as well.
- If your previous penalty was nothing to do with the tools at all, and the link profile of those pages is good (or if there aren't any links) then 301 the old URLs to the new.
That's if between Pete and myself we've understood correctly what you're trying to achieve.
Good Luck!
-
So, I'm confused - are you looking to keep both sites active? If you're just moving the tools to a new domain, you could NOINDEX the old pages. If the link-based penalty isn't too severe, you might try a cross-domain rel=canonical on the old site. Unfortunately, without understanding the penalty profile, it's a bit tricky to advise. It's really a cost/benefit trade-off - how much risk of carrying the penalty are you willing to accept vs. the alternative of cutting off all authority and starting over on the new site.
If you've had Panda-related problems, though, I wouldn't keep the tools crawlable on both sites. That seems more likely to prolong your problems than it is to solve them.
-
In fact, I am not moving any content from the old website to the new one. It's just 3 online tools that I wanted to keep for the new website. They both have different content though but the functionalities are the same. I've "noindex" the tools on the old website.
By the way, the manual penalty has been revoked on the old website a few weeks ago.
-
I tend to agree with Martin - it seems like there's probably a way to preserve some of the power of the old site and 301-redirect selectively (or potentially use cross-domain rel=canonical tags), but it would take a much deeper understanding of the site than Q&A allows.
If you rebuild the site from scratch, you'd almost always want to de-index the old site. I'd flat out remove it via Google Webmaster Tools - it's the fastest method. Leaving both sites crawlable is only going to compound your problems and haunt the new site.
I'd warn, though, that if this is Panda-related, just moving the content won't solve your problems. You do have to sort out why they happened in the first place, or the same algorithmic issues will just come back. In other words, if the problems are content-related, then it doesn't really matter where the content lives. If the problems are link related, then moving will remove the problems. Of course, moving will also remove and advantages you currently have based on good links.
Unfortunately, this isn't a problem that can be addressed without a pretty deep audit. My gut feeling is that there may be a way to preserve some of the authority of the old site, but you really need to pin down the problems. Panda + Penguin is a wide swath of potential problems and just isn't enough information to do this right.
-
Some of this "content" are in fact online tools and the tutorials that accompanies it.
-
Hi Stephane,
All the below assumes you feel there is some value in keeping the original website live at all.
My first reaction would be to do a full review of all your old content and carefully consider which ones may have been hit by Panda - is there keyword stuffing, content duplicated from other sites, thin content...etc? Then either fix or completely rewrite those.
After that you should avoid publishing duplicated content so my view would be
1. Remove the rewritten/fixed articles completely from the old site
2. Don't implement the 301 so you don't get any redirected bad Penguin vibe
3. Put a block on those URLs using robots.txt
4. Remove the URLs from Google's index in Webmaster ToolsThen you are free to publish your new, Panda-friendly content to your new website.
Not sure what other mozzers would say, but that's my view. This is not about 'spinning content' but removing poor content and republishing great content. Hope it makes sense.
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 redirecting http and non www versions of our website. Should all versions http (non www version and www version) and https (non www version) should just have 1 redirect to the https www version?
We are redirecting http and non www versions of our website. Should all versions http (non www version and www version) and https (non www version) should just have 1 redirect to the https www version? Thant way all forms of the website are pointing to one version?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
If my website do not have a robot.txt file, does it hurt my website ranking?
After a site audit, I find out that my website don't have a robot.txt. Does it hurt my website rankings? One more thing, when I type mywebsite.com/robot.txt, it automatically redirect to the homepage. Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | binhlai0 -
Question about moving content from one site to another without a 301
I could use a second opinion about moving content from some inactive sites to my main site. Once upon a time, we had a handful of geotargeted websites set up targeting various cities that we serve. This was in addition to our main site, which was mostly targeted to our primary office and ranked great for those keywords. Our main site has plenty of authority, has been around for ages, etc. We built out these geo-targeted sites with some good landing pages and kept them active with regularly scheduled blog posts which were unique and either interesting or helpful. Although we had a little success with these, we eventually saw the light and realized that our main site was strong enough to rank for these cities as well, which made life a whole lot easier, not to mention a lot less spammy. We've got some good content on these other sites that I'd like to use on our main site, especially the blog posts. Now that I've got it through my head that there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, I understand that I could just start moving this content over so long as I put a 301 redirect in place where the content used to be on these old sites. Which leads me to my question. Our SEO was careful not to have these other websites pointing to our main site to avoid looking like we were trying to do something shady from a link building perspective. His concern is that these redirects would undermine that effort and having a bunch of redirects from a half dozen sites could end up hurting us somehow. Do you think that is the case? What he is suggesting we do is remove all of the content that we'd like to use and use Webmaster Tools to request that this content be removed from the index. Then, after the sites have been recrawled, we'll check for ourselves to confirm they've been removed and proceed with using the content however we'd like. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeeAbrahamson0 -
Moving half my website to a new website: 301?
Good Morning! We currently have two websites which are driving all of our traffic. Our end goal is to combine the two and fold them into each other. Can I redirect the duplicate content from one domain to our main domain even though the URL's are different. Ill give an example below. (The domains are not the real domains). The CEO does not want to remove the other website entirely yet, but is willing to begin some sort of consolidation process. ABCaddiction.com is the main domain which covers everything from drug addiction to dual diagnosis treatment. ABCdualdiagnosis.com is our secondary website which covers everything as well. Can I redirect the entire drug addiction half of the website to ABCaddiction.com? With the eventual goal of moving everything together.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Best practice for duplicate website content: same root domain name but different extension
Hi there I have a new client who has two websites: http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.co.nz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | turnbullholdingsltd
http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.org.nz They are the same in every regard apart from the domain extension (.co.nz & .org.nz) which is likely to be causing them issues with Google ranking given the huge amount of duplicate content. What is the best practice approach to fixing this? Normally, if I was starting from scratch, I would set one of the extensions as an alias which redirects to the main domain. Thanks in advance. Laurie0 -
Copying my Facebook content to website considered duplicate content?
I write career advice on Facebook on a daily basis. On my homepage users can see the most recent 4-5 feeds (using FB social media plugin). I am thinking to create a page on my website where visitors can see all my previous FB feeds. Would this be considered duplicate content if I copy paste the info, but if I use a Facebook social media plugin then it is not considered duplicate content? I am working on increasing content on my website and feel incorporating FB feeds would make sense. thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
Old Redirecting Website Still Showing In SERPs
I have a client, a plumber, who bought another plumbing company (and that company's domain) at one point. This other company was very old and has a lot of name recognition so they created a dedicated page to this other company within their main website, and redirected the other company's old domain to that page. This has worked fine, in that this page on the main site is now #1 when you search for the other old company's name. But for some reason the old domain comes up #2 (despite the fact that it's redirecting). Now, I could understand if the redirect had only been set up recently, but I'm reasonably sure this happened about a year ago. Could it be due to the fact that there are many sites out there still linking to that old domain? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VTDesignWorks1 -
Redirecting Canonical 301s and Magento Website
I have an issue with a client's website where it has 3700+ pages, but roughly half of them are duplicates. Thankfully, the only difference between the original and the duplictes is the "?print" at the end of each URL (I suppose this is Magento's way of making a printable page version of the same page. I don't know, I didn't build it.) My questions is, how can I get all the pages like this http://www.mycompany.com/blah.html?print to redirect to pages like this... http://www.mycompany.com/blah.html Also, do they NEED to be Canonical, or will a 301 redirect be sufficient. Also, after having done this, if anybody knows, is there a way I can turn that feature off in Magento, because we're expanding our product line, and I don't want to have to keep chasing after these "?print" pages after the fact.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClifThompson0