Moving to a new site while keeping old site live

[kdaniels]

For reasons I won't get into here, I need to move most of my site to a new domain (DOMAIN B) while keeping every single current detail on the old domain (DOMAIN A) as it is. Meaning, there will be 2 live websites that have mostly the same content, but I want the content to appear to search engines as though it now belongs to DOMAIN B. Weird situation. I know.

I've run around in circles trying to figure out the best course of action. What do you think is the best way of going about this?

• Do I simply point DOMAIN A's canonical tags to the copied content on DOMAIN B and call it good?
• Should I ask sites that link to DOMAIN A to change their links to DOMAIN B, or start fresh and cut my losses?
• Should I still file a change of address with GWT, even though I'm not going to 301 redirect anything?

[kdaniels]

Thanks for your rseponses!

Hey RobertJakobson, doesn't Google advise against having canonical and noindex on the same page? And if you setup canonicals + change of address, what would be the purpose of noindexing?

[94501]

Great question. Unless and until site B develops it's own new link profile and/or gets site A's pages 301'd to site B, in most moderately competitive searches, site B won't produce search-wise like site A (assuming site A produces).

I would therefor, if at all possible in your particular situation, set search expectations accordingly low and/or move as quickly as possible to 301ing the old pages to their new versions. Canonical tags to tell Google that site B is the one true copy of the content will of course not substitute for a good link profile plus old pages 301'd. It will be content without authority.

Maybe you can't ever get rid of site A as your question implies, in which case realize site B will not perform as well search-wise and set expectations accordingly.

Either way, get a list of all the external/incoming links to site A and work to get them updated to site B. This may be a lot of slow pick and shovel work, depending on what's in place already.

If you can anticipate after some reasonable amount of time 301ing old pages to new pages, skip Robert's 2 & 3 as you'd want Google still crawling the old urls to discover the eventual 301s.

Best of luck!

[RobertJakobson]

Hi, here're the 3 steps that should work easily:

1. Add the canonical URL-s as you already know how. Wait for the new domain to rank. But don't stop there.
2. After you've seen new domain rising place robots.txt and no-index meta tags on the old site instructing Google not to index it.
3. Use Google Webmaster Tools to request Site Removal for the old site: under Google index -> Remove URL-s place the full domain of your old site. You should see that instead of a "page removal" you will be asked to confirm a "site removal". More instructions here from Google.