How best to handle partial domain move?
-
The scenario is this, we have a website eg: ABC.com where the content is in two language folders (en-us and en-gb).
We have created a new brand with website XYZ.com for the USA market. Of course, this domain will take a while to rank because it is completely fresh.
My question is how best to deactivate the en-us content on the old site to:
a) prevent it showing up on Google US
and
b) pass the US traffic to the new website to boost its rankingsI was thinking of removing the en-us pages from ABC.com and using a 410 error page containing a link to XYZ.com
Would it be better to replace the content on en-us instead (with a link)?I'm not keen to use a straight 301 redirect as sometimes we get traffic from other countries to the en-us content.
Thanks in advance Mozzers
-
Thanks Martjin, the first site does use href lang tags but we want to lower the profile of that site in the USA and pass some link juice from it to the new USA website.
-
Hi,
Look into the use of HREF Lang tags, they could help you out by still having two sites, not redirecting the pages and having them show up in search engines for both regions/ languages. if you haven't heard about it, you can find more information on them here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag
Hope that helps a bit.
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
-
Moved brand's shop to a new domain. will our organic traffic recuperate?
Hello, We are a healthcare company with a strong domain authority and several thousand pages of service related content at brand.com. We've been operating an ancillary ecommerce store that sells related 3rd party products at brand.com/shop for a little over a year. We recently invested in a platform upgrade and moved our site to a new domain, brandshop.com. We implemented page-level 301 redirects including all category pages, product detail pages, canonical and non-canonical URLs, etc.. which the understanding that there would not be any loss in page rank. What we're seeing over the last 2 months is an initial dive in organic traffic, followed by a ramp-up period of if impressions (but not position) in the following weeks, another drop and we've steady at this low for the last 2 weeks. Another area that might have hurt us, the 301 redirects were implemented correctly immediately post launch (on a wednesday), but it was discovered on the following Monday that our .htaccess file had reverted to an old version without the redirect rules. For 3-4 days, all traffic was being redirected from brand.com/shop/url to brandshop.com/badurl. Can we expect to recover our organic traffic giving the launch screw up with the .htaccess file, or is it more of an issue with us separating from the brand.com domain? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eugene_p
Eugene0 -
What is best practice for "Sorting" URLs to prevent indexing and for best link juice ?
We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon. Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization? On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.0 -
Best Sitemap Generator XML
Hello Everyone, Can Anyone Suggest best Site map Generator Software??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ieplnupur0 -
Best way to handle traffic from links brought in from old domain.
I've seen many versions of answers to this question both in the forum, and throughout the internet... However, none of them seem to specifically address this particular situation. Here goes: I work for a company that has a website (www.example.com) but has also operated under a few different names in the past. I discovered that a friend of the company was still holding onto one of the domains that belonged to one of the older versions of the company (www.asample.com) and he was kind enough to transfer it into our account. My first reaction was to simply 301 redirect the older to the newer. After I did this, I discovered that there were still quite a few active and very relevant links to that domain, upon reporting this to the company owners they were suddenly concerned that a customer may feel misdirected by clicking www.asample.com and having www.example.com pop up. So I constructed a single page on the old domain that explained that www.asample.com was now called www.example.com and provided a link. We recently did a little house cleaning and moved all of our online holdings "under one roof" so to speak, and when the rep was going over things with the owners began to exclaim that this was a horrible idea, and that domain should instead be linked to it's own hosting account, and wordpress (or some other CMS) should be installed, and a few pages of content about the companies/subject should be posted. So the question: Which one of these is the most beneficial to the site and the business that are currently operating (www.example.com?) I don't see a real problem with any of these answers, but I do see a potentially un-needed expense in the third solution if a simple 301 will bring about the most value. Anyone else dealt with a situation like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | modulusman0 -
What would be the best domain choice?
Hello I got a website www.keywordCA.com and I'm ranking #1 spot on "keyword" but what I notice if you have the exact match you get more site links and etc. Like this keyword that match with my domain name "keyword CA" The ideal name will be www.keyword.com but is taken and the owner don't want to sell the domain (at least he is not using it, is just parked) and I also got the domain www.keyword.net Do you think www.keyword.net will be much better than KeywordCA.com in order to get more exposure and google will generate more site links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpgprinting0 -
Confusion about domain extension.
Hi, need bit suggestions from you guys. After researchi found a KW that have some good Lcoal search volume.. My question is should i buy the CLD as it has good LS volume or i should go for .com , .net etc. Becasue as i know that LS means that number of people searching form that location(based on IP) not number of people searching in that local version of google. So no need to go for CLD as it vl help only in local version.. Bit confused waiting for reply thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Big_Zee0 -
Legit Domain Masking
I am working with a real estate client. They have one main site (ie. company.com) that contains all the info, then they have several name domains (ie. salesrepresentative.com) that are forwarding to the main site, but use domain masking to appear as if there is a separate site for each representative. My question is how can I make this legit in Google's eyes, or is this totally not advised?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukao0 -
How risky is temporarily moving high value SEO pages to a brand new domain?
Hi, I won't bore you with all the details but we may have to temporarily move part of an existing domain onto a separate domain for a couple of months. The content being moved includes most of our key branded and organic SERP pages. We've owned the new domain for years but it's never been live or indexed. After a couple of months, all the content will move back to the original domain but will move to a slightly different structure and different page names. Most of the page content will remain largely the same. I"m concerned, but don't really have any experience with this kind of thing. Can anyone shed some light. Perhaps on a scale of 1 to 5 you could give me your thoughts: 1. Should be fine, as long as you set up all the redirects properly 5. Do everything in your power not to do it! Using the new domain and other factors will be problematic. Thanks for any help you may be able to provide!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rfjc0