Site Migration Question
-
Hi Guys,
I am preparing for a pretty standard site migration. Small business website moving to a new domain, new branding and new cms.
Pretty much a perfect storm.
Right now the new website is being designed and will need another month, however the client is pretty antsy to get her new brand out over the web. We cannot change the current site, which has the old branding.
She wants to start passing out business cards and hang banners with the new domain and brand. However, I don't want to be messing with any redirects and potentially screw up a clean migration from the old site to the new. To be specific, she wants to redirect the new domain to the current domain and then when the new site, flip the redirect.
However, I'm a little apprehensive with that because a site migration from the current to the new is already so intricate, I don't want to leave any possibility of error.
I'm trying to figure out the best solution, these are 2 options I am thinking of:
- DO NOT market new domain. Reprint all Marketing material and wait until new domain is up and then start marketing it. (At cost to client)
- Create a one pager on new domain saying the site is being built & have a No Follow link to the current site. No redirects added. Just the no follow link.
I'd like option 2 so that the client could start passing out material, but my number one concern is messing with any part of the migration.
We are about to submit a sitemap index to Google Search Console for the current site, so we are just starting the site migration.
What do you guys think?
-
You helped validate my thoughts. Yeah, the reason I am taking this so seriously is because we are taking so much time to map out the old domain and the pages to their corresponding new pages, that I don't want something like this to ruin it.
The client ended up saying that they don't mind reprinting a handful of business cards to reflect the old domain and then use the new cards when the new site is up. Either way, I think both options are doable.
Thanks mememax! Appreciate it.
-
I imagine there is no way to show the new design and layout on the old domain.
If that's the case I find option #2 to be the best. You are showing the new website while keeping the areas you're developing closed, and without any redirects. It's critical that you place redirect from old to new website after everything is ready so you can make a page by page or section by sections redirect and not send everything to the homepage.
I understand that clients sometimes wants to move forward but it's better to make things right. You're still providing hiim/her and option to start marketing it, although I still think it's not a good idea as people will see a work in progress website. Ensure to explain all the drawbacks on moving on early as you may be wasting a good marketing opportunity.
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
-
SEO Migration Options
Hi Guys, We have a www.sitename.com.au domain name and looking to move into the US market, and other markets in the future such as UK, Canada, etc. We are reviewing our options. Currently the .com.au is ccTLD to Australia so won't perform well in US. It seems the best option at this stage is to get a generic domain Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) like a .com. Then create different sub-folders for each country for example: .com our main country .com/us/ target us .com/uk/ Then in Google Search Console don't set country targeting for entire domain but use Hreflang Tags to specify the targeting for each page? -- This seems like a complex strategy to execute so i just want to check if this would be a optional option? Any suggestions would be very much appreciated! Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cerednicenko0 -
Migrating to a new domain
Hi The company I work for are planing to re-brand & come under our parent company name. This means the whole site will be moved to a new domain. Does anyone have any experience with this and can give me some useful docs to read/any advice? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Moving multiple Sites to One Site and SEO Impact/Ideas
Hi there, We are in the process of moving 2 sites with higher page authority to another site we own (that is our company brand), so essentially 3 sites into one. We're at risk of losing a lot of SEO from the original 2 sites that have all the product information. We are doing this since we merged companies a couple years back and need one web precense. Anyhow, the site launch date is in 3 months and the recommendation is to start moving content over prior to that for top pages, which is a big undertaking when we are launching all the pages again with new content, redeisgn and moving sites in 3 months. If it's the right move, we should do it, but I just wanted to get opinions on how others have handled something similiar when moving to a site with lower site authority and trying not to lose rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
Schema question
Hi all, We have two Trustpilot schemas (Local Business) on our web pages ( One on desktop / one on mobile) but we are finding that it is not updating the number of reviews in the search results. When using the tool : https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/ , the test results are coming back ok. I have two ideas as to why it may not be working; 1) The duplication of the schema code is causing issues 2) We had to change the html code for all of our 50+ backend pages using a search&replace WordPress plugin to save a vast amount of time. Maybe this is plugin related? The fact that the google testing tool gives back positive results adds to the confusion. I test both of the theorised issues to see if it provides a fixes. Can anyone shed some further light on this issue? Is there something obvious I am missing? All responses are greatly appreciated! Thanks, Tom p.s. Example Page: https://www.allcleartravel.co.uk/asthma-travel-insurance/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AllClearMarketing0 -
To redirect or not to redirect, that is the question
I work for a software company that is redeveloping the website (same domain.) We have tons of content in the form of articles and documents for support, how to use the product better, case studies, and blog posts. I've downloaded a landing page report and many of these have low impressions and little or no clicks (some ranked high other very low.) Should I redirect all this content to the new site where some of it won't exist or forget about it because of the lack of juice? Is there a rule-of-thumb threshold for redirecting for content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody15969167212220 -
Penguin recovery, no manual action. Are our EMD sites killing our brand site?
Hi guys, Our brand site (http://urban3d.net) has been seeing steady decline due to algorithm updates for the past two years. Our previous SEO company engaged in some black-hat link building which has hurt us very badly. We have recently re-launched the site, with better design, better content, and completed a disavow of hundreds of bad links. The site is technically indexed, but is still nowhere in the SERPs after months of work to recover it by our internal marketing team. The last SEO company also told us to build EMD sites for our core services, which we did: http://3dvisualisation.co.uk/ http://propertybrochure.com/ http://kitchencgi.com/ My question is - could these EMD sites now hurting us even further and stopping our main brand site from ranking? Our plan is to rescue our brand site, with a view to retiring these outlier sites. However, with no progress on the brand site, we can't afford to remove these site (which are ranking). It seems a bit chicken and egg. Any advice would be very much appreciated. Aidan, Urban 3D
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aidancass0 -
Duplicate Content Question
Hey Everyone, I have a question regarding duplicate content. If your site is penalized for duplicate content, is it just the pages with the content on it that are affected or is the whole site affected? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhinchcliffe0 -
On-Site Optimization Tips for Job site?
I am working on a job site that only ranks well for the homepage with very low ranking internal pages. My job pages do not rank what so ever and are database driven and often times turn to 404 pages after the job has been filled. The job pages have to no content either. Anybody have any technical on-site recommendations for a job site I am working on especially regarding my internal pages? (Cross Country Allied.com)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0