Moving blogs to different domain
-
Hey guys,
We currently have some blogs on one of our pages (fraserisland.com.au) and we are launching a complete rebranding of our sites. We want to move the blogs from fraserisland.com.au to the new parent page of travelfreedom.com.au (but still link it to fraserisland.com.au), however I don't know what affect this will have on the ranking of the blogs.
The biggest thing I'm worried about is that the domain will be completely different, and not a sub domain, but I'm not sure what impact this will have on the effectiveness of SEO on the blog.
Thanks guys
-
I think this way the Ranking fluctuation will be none to minimum.
-
Thanks Dan! I totally agree with you...
-
Thanks Moosa! Just want to clarify a few points to be sure they don't get mis-understood by other readers:
Duplicate content
- just want to make sure they know, although duplicate content is not the best thing, there is no penalty per se
Cross Domain Canonical
- search engines will in fact crawl both versions. They will just not index the one with the canonical tag pointing to the source page.
-
Hi Lehia
Given that your site has relatively low domain authority right now of 17 and to eliminate user (and your) confusion, I would 301 redirect every individual blog URL to the corresponding new URL on the new domain. It's possible you may lose some ranking - but let me ask:
- how much traffic do you get from the blog right now?
- I bet there's a typical 80/20 pattern where maybe a small handful of blog URLs are getting more of the traffic?
Point being, I would really do what's best in the long-term and to consolidate your brands/domains. I've performed and seen many migrations perfectly fine.
One last thing!
- Crawl your old site or somehow gather up the old URLs from the old domain
- Throw them in Screaming Frog in List mode
- Export the "Redirect Chain" report
- And undo any redirect chains
I talk about that a little here.
Also, make sure you continue to allow Google to crawl the old domain (don't block it with robots.txt).
-
Thanks Moosa! That helps heap. I think the best practice is to just keep the blogs on their current URL, and then put in a 301 from the new parent domain to the existing blogs. That way people can find the blogs through the parent domain and be direct to the existing Urls. Would you agree?
-
Thanks Josh!
-
You said but still link it to fraserisland.co.au. From this you mean a same blog post can be access from this and the new URL?
- Two different URL containing the same content will be considered as duplicate content, which is defiantly not a good idea when it comes to rankings!
- If you 301 (let’s say you do it right) the URL from old domain to new domain. This will eliminate the duplicate content issue but redirection does lose some amount of link juice so your rankings will see a dip for few days and weeks if not permanent.
- If you set cross domain canonical, this will allow the user to see the same blog post on two different URLs but search engine will only crawl the preferred version so it will be two pages for user but search engine will only consider the preferred version. Not really a good idea in my opinion as I hope most of your blog traffic is coming from search engines anyways…
I think whatever step you will take the rankings are going to change (temporary or permanent) so you have to keep your strategy designed accordingly.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Handling External links to articles in a blog
I have a blog that has it's own articles but then also want to feature third-party sites that have my op-ed content on them. Wondering what is the best practice for handling external links. The reason we want to do this: Make sure our followers and people who subscribe to our blog see all our content (especially when a third-party "high authority" publisher is featuring articles from our authors We also want to be able to get a ranking for the article title when someone searches for it on Search Engines. i.e I write an article for hubspot called "my article about something". When googling "my article about something" I want to see both the Hubspot listing (where my article originated on) as well as a link to my website where I show an abstract (original abstract) and then the link links to the hubspot article. For example: www.myblog.com/listing (renders a listing of articles with links to each individual article) If showing an "abstract" for the blog article and then linking out to the third-party source (where content is featured) www.myblog.com/category/post-title (renders actual article page) When showing an individual post-title page what are the minimum requirements (META TAGS, length or amount of characters ,etc) Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | dspete0 -
Blog links: Going out or staying in?
I am a wedding photographer and have a "Venues" page on my website. Am I better associating the links to the venue's actual website or to a blog post featuring a wedding I did there? (PS: In the blog post there will be a post aiming at the venue's website.) Thanks!
Link Building | | IoanSaid0 -
Domain redirect math?
I’m thinking about buying the domain of a former competitor who is getting out of the business. His site has quite a few links, a healthy link profile from several hundred domains (a few common sites, but mostly different) and a Domain Authority of 44 (mine is a 55). His anchor text portfolio is very appropriate to my business, and the domain contains one of my most important keywords (one that’s in my own domain). His site ranks for a many of the same keywords as mine. Where mine is #3, his might be #4. I don’t want to operate his business (there’s a reason he’s getting out), but I was thinking that redirecting the domain to appropriate pages on mine would give a boost to the many long tail keywords which constitute a considerable part of my business. The question is how much of a boost? How much should I be willing to pay for his domain? If I get x visits/year from organic search and he gets y, and both sites rank for approximately the same terms, how much would you expect the two sites together get? Is there a rule of thumb for calculating this kind of thing involving some kind of logarithmic math? Does the combination of links of similar sites make 1+1=2, <2, or >2? Or is the only way to make this estimate to go through each of the major keywords trying to figure out what will happen to each? If, for instance, on average we combined our #3 & #4 rankings and got a #2 ranking, that would probably increase my clicks by 50% because of their higher SERP prominence. Based on my research, a visitor to my website is worth about $14. Assuming that his natural search visitors would be worth about the same amount if directed to my site, I would probably make 1/2 x * $14/year. I'm least comfortable with the first assumption. Is there a better way to evaluate this?
Link Building | | TREWS0 -
How can I find all the outbound links from a website domain?
I want to find all the outbound links (basically whatever comes in <a>tag) from a domain (say www.abc.com) as well as all the subdomains under it (say abc.com/a etc). Open Site Explorer provides the inbound links from a website but does not provide any functionality to get all the outbound links from a website. Is it possible to do?</a> <a>Thanks in advance. Deepak Jain</a>
Link Building | | Deepak_Jain0 -
Linking Root Domain does not show twitter
I wonder what it takes to capture twitter as a backlink. We have a twitter account @idyllicsoftware which never occurs in open site explorer. Also it never shows newer back links. Could you suggest how to use it better?
Link Building | | idyllicsoftware0 -
Has there been a change in the Competitive Domain Analysis?
I've noted the total number of links has dropped drastically on multiple reports. Is there something new in the Competitive Domain Report or is it really just my clients? Also I've noticed that all of my clients have seen slight decreases in MozTrust - is this related to your reports analysis of panda? Thanks!!
Link Building | | LeslieVS0 -
No Follow Blogs. Do they help with keyword density?
I know no follow blogs don't pass page rank or link juice, but do they aid in help with making your site know for a specific keyword when you use anchor text?
Link Building | | photoseo10 -
How Many Domain 301s Can You Have?
A client owns around 10 different domains, each a slightly different version of their company name. The main site is itself a new domain, therefore they'd like to know what the implications of redirecting the 10 other domains to the main one would be. Any thoughts? I have never done this before, so interested to know whether a) there's any benefit and b) if there is a penalty for implementing too many domain 301s. Thanks.
Link Building | | RiceMedia0