Site was moved, but still exists on the old server and is being outranked for it's own name
-
Recently, a client went through a split with a business partner, they both had websites on the same domain, but within their own sub directories.
There is a main landing page, which links to both sites, the landing page sits on the root.
Ie. example.com is a landing page with links to example.com/partner1, and example.com/partner2
Parter 2 will be my client for this example.
After the split, partner 2 downloaded his website, and put it up on his own server, but no longer has any kind of access to the old servers ftp, and partner 1 is refusing to cooperate in any way to have the site removed from the old server.
They did add a 301 redirect for the home page on the old server for partner 2, so,
example.com/partner2/index.html is 301'ing to the new site on the new server, HOWEVER, every other page is still live on that old server, and is outranking the new site in every instance.
The home page is also being outranked, even with the 301 redirect in place.
What are some steps I can take to rectify this?
The clients main concern is that this old website, containing the old partners name, is outranking him for his own name, and the name of his practice.
So far, here's what i've been thinking:
Since the site has poor on-page optimization, i'll start be cleaning all of that up.
I'll then optimize the home page to better depict the clients name and practice through proper usage of heading tags, titles, alt, etc, as well as the meta title and description.
The only other thing I can think of would be to start building some backlinks?
Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks.
-
Then send a DMCA to the server company. The server company doesn't care that he's a lawyer, and I bet your client and send a very well written one.
Besides that, you're strategy moving forward seems pretty sound.
-
Thanks for the response William,
Ironically enough.. they're both Lawyers.
Unfortunately, the old parter is refusing to cooperate at all as far as getting those pages 301'd or removing the site from the server completely.
-
First things first: before you start working on optimizing the new site, I would work on resolving the issue with the old partner, since this is an issue that can continue to haunt you for a long time if you don't.
The old partner needs to 301 redirect all pages in your client's subdirectory to the new site. Offer to send him the steps needed to do this. If he refuses, let him know that he does not own the data from your client's side of the old website, and you will therefor be forced to send DMCA takedown requests to the server company and to him for straight-up copyright infringement. Once he cooperates and puts in the proper 301s, you will have much less to worry about.
Unless, for some reason, the old partner does own the data, in which case, you shouldn't be using it on the new site.
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
-
What's more valuable, a Blog or a Forum, and how to integrate?
We want to start a blog or forum (maybe eventually both) and are unsure what is the best way to publish it from an SEO standpoint. If the blog is published on our domain, like domain.com/blog then that obviously helps the site but if the base site is a for-profit business wouldn't it get less credibility, eyeballs, links as opposed to if you started the blog as it's own separate community on a separate domain and then just strategically linked to the for profit site (sponsorship links)? Essentially the question is, if I'm the Lucky Soday Company, do I start a Blog on the Lucky Soda website, or do I start a separate website to grow a soft drink enthusiast community blog / forum? I would guess a blog has more SEO potential than a discussion forum?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MrSem0 -
Merging two existing company sites into one
Hi Moz community, I have recently started a new job for a Fire & Security company in the UK to help with their non existent SEO efforts. Currently they have two separate websites. One of the websites is for their services and the other website is for their eCommerce store selling fire alarm equipment etc. The eCommerce store is higher up in the SERPs and overall has a lot more links. It also uses a better branded domain name. As I have never attempted such a project I have a few questions. The current eCommerce store is hosted and maintained by another web company which uses their bespoke CMS. What I want to do is take the service website and merge it with the ecommerce domain, however the service site runs on wordpress, which I want to continue for its flexibility. The service page wants to be the new homepage with a link on it to go to the store. I just cant get my head around the whole operation so if anyone could give me some advice to point me in the right direction that would be great. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradNichol0 -
Help my site it's not being indexed
Hello... We have a client, that had arround 17K visits a month... Last september he hired a company to do a redesign of his website....They needed to create a copy of the site on a different subdomain on another root domain... so I told them to block that content in order to not affect my production site, cause it was going to be an exact replica of the content but different design.... The developmet team did it wrong and blocked the production site (using robots.txt), so my site lost all it's organica traffic, which was 85-90% of the total traffic and now only get a couple of hundreds visits a month... First I thought we had been somehow penalized, however when I the other site recieving new traffic and being indexed i realized so I switched the robots.txt and created 301 redirect from the subdomain to the production site. After resending sitemaps, links to google+ and many things I can't get google to reindex my site.... when i do a site:domain.com search in google I only get 3 results. Its been now almost 2 month and honestly dont know what to do.... Any help would be greatly appreciated Thanks Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0 -
Lost 86% of traffic after moving old static site to WordPress
I hired a company to convert an old static website www.rawfoodexplained.com with about 1200 pages of content to WordPress. Four days after launch it lost almost 90% of traffic. It was getting over 60,000 uniques while nobody touched the site for several years. It’s been 21 days since the WordPress launch. I read a lot of stuff prior to moving it (including Moz's case study) and I was expecting to lose in short term 30% of traffic max… I don’t understand what is wrong. The internal link structure is the same, every url is 301 to the same url only without[dot]html (ie www.rawfoodexplained.com/science.html is 301′s to http://www.rawfoodexplained.com/science/ ), it’s added to Google Webmaster tool and Google indexed the new pages… Any ideas what could be possible wrong? I do understand the website is not optimized (meta descriptions etc, but it wasn't before either) .... Do you think putting back the old site would recover the traffic? I would appreciate any thoughts Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JakubH0 -
A few questions on Google's Structured Data Markup Helper...
I'm trying to go through my site and add microdata with the help of Google's Structured Data Markup Helper. I have a few questions that I have not been able to find an answer for. Here is the URL I am referring to: http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-chicago My company is a bar/club, with only 4 out of 13 locations serving food. Would you mark this up as a local business or a restaurant? It asks for "URL" above the ratings. Is this supposed to be the URL that ratings are on like Yelp or something? Or is it the URL for the page? Either way, neither of those URLs are on the page so I can't select them. If it is for Yelp should I link to it? How do I add reviews? Do they have to be on the page? If I make a group of days for Day of the Week for Opening hours, such as Mon-Thu, will that work out? I have events on this page. However, when I tried to do the markup for just the event it told me to use itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Event" on the body tag of the page. That is just a small part of the page, I'm not sure why I would put the event tag on the whole body? Any other tips would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | howlusa0 -
Moving Entire Domain to New Site with New File Extensions
I have been looking for a while for a good an clear Step by Step guide for moving a site from an old to a new domain... so I guess a good discussion here, could help many web masters have a smooth transition. So in your opinion, beside the obvious, what are the most important steps you must take? Here is what I do: 1. 301 old site to new one and TEST.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dhidalgo1
2. Check Internal Links - Double Check for 404's.
3. Update your Social Profiles with new URL.
4. Let GWT and BWT of the change and request a Crawl.
5. Contact as Many of Webmaster as you possibly can to point your links to your new domain. What's missing? What have you found helpful and/or Effective?0 -
Old deleted sitemap still shown in webmaster tools
Hello I have redisgned a website inl new url structure in cms. Old sitemap was not set to 404 but changed with new sitemap files,also new sitemap was named different to old one.All redirections done properly Still 3 month after google still shows me duplicate titile and metas by comparing old and new urls I am lost in what to do now to eliminate the shown error. How can google show urls that are not shown in sitemap any more? Looking forward to any help Michelles
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tit0 -
Do EMD's give the boost everyone says they do?
Hi, I have used a few myself and if I was targeting UK search with a [emd] .co.uk, every time the domain has hit page 1 with little effort. I have done this maybe 4-5 times, my moz stats show 0 but I rank above results on page 1 with moz stats of DA:45+. Can I now say basically any EMD I buy will rocket through the serp's?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0