Phasing in new website on www2 domain - 301 plan

[RWesley]

Hi,

I work for a large company and we're planning to phase in a new website. The idea is to develop key journeys on the new site and serve them on a www2 domain, removing them from the old website which is served on the www domain.

The reason for this is because the old website is over 2,000 pages, and the management want to see new, improved journeys sooner rather than later. So, rather than launching all new pages and journeys at the same time, which will take a long time to design and develop, key journeys will move across to the new site / design sooner and made available to visitors.

Whilst the overall journey might be a bit disjointed in parts (i.e. sending people from old to new site, and vice versa) I can't see a better way of doing it...

Once all new content is complete, 301s will be implemented from old content on www. to new content www2.

Once the phasing is complete, and all new content is in place on www2, 301s will be implemented to point everything back to www.

Does anybody see any problems with this approach? Or any ideas on how to better handle this situation?

Thanks Mozzers!

[RWesley]

Excellent, thank you Chris.

I would prefer to keep the URL path the same, but to be honest the original URL path is a bit of a mess, so I'm taking this opportunity to clean it up.

Really appreciate your help on this!

[GFD_Chris]

Your proposed redirect strategy looks good. If possible, I would keep the same URL path on the www subdomain. That way, when you're finished, you could simply remove the 302 redirects.

1. I would keep the redirects in place until the new content on the www subdomain is live.

2. Personally, I would avoid using the canonical tag in this situation. Google treats this as a hint and not a directive. If your content is too different, Google might just ignore the canonical tag and index both versions. As well, if you use the canonical tag from the ww2 domain to www subdomain, Google will only view the www subdomain content quality. If your content/UX is better on the ww2 subdomain, you won't receive any of that SEO benefit during that time.

[RWesley]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for getting back to me. That's sound advice, and it makes perfect sense. So, I will do the following:

302 redirect
from www.mydomain.com/old-version-of-page
to www2.mydomain.com/new-version-of-page

Then, once we are ready to publish the new content on to the main www domain, I will do the following because the new URL string will be slightly different from the original:

301 redirect
from www.mydomain.com/old-version-of-page to www.mydomain.com/new-version-of-page

Does that make sense?

Just a couple of other questions, if that's okay:

1. How long do you think the 302 redirects can stay in place? It may have to be there for 12 - 18 months, while we're developing the rest of the new site.
2. I came across this article at the weekend, which suggests the following for the www2 temporary version of pages: (1) pointing a rel=canonical tag from the temporary pages to the main pages, and (2) using the meta robots content="noindex" tag to tell search engines not to index the temporary pages. Would you agree with this approach?

Thanks again!

[GFD_Chris]

Got it!

While I've been a pretty heavy advocate against them, this might be a situation where using 302 (temporary) redirects is the best option. The current plan will tell Google:

1. The site is permanently moving the content to the ww2 subdomain
2. The site is now  permanently moving the content back to the www subdomain.

Instead by implementing 302 redirects gradually as the content goes live, you would send stronger signals that this is only a temporary move.

Let me know if you have any questions on this, would be happy to chat more: chris.long@gofishdigital.com

[RWesley]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for replying, I really appreciate it.

In answer to your first question...  we will be incrementally adding new content on the www2 subdomain, 301 redirecting from existing content on the www subdomain. This will be done gradually, over around 24 months, until all of the www content can be 301 redirected to www2 - and a full site is in place on the www2 subdomain. At this point, once everything is on the www2 subdomain, we will then do one final migration to move all new content on www2 back to the www domain, as we don't want our primary domain to be the www2 subdomain long-term.

The content will be similar, but more engaging and richer on the www2 subdomain. But, because 301s will be implemented incrementaly when the new content is launched on www2, there will no duplicate content across the subdomains.

The TLD will remain the same throughout this process.

I hope that answers your questions - let me know if you need any more clarity.

Thanks again!

[GFD_Chris]

So if I understand it correctly, you're going to be incrementally adding new pages on the ww2 subdomain while content still exists on the www subdomain. This will be done slowly until all of the www content can be 301 redirected to ww2?

If that's the case, there's a few other things that could be helpful to know:

• What's the expected timeline to get all of the new ww2 pages live?
• How similar will the ww2 content be to the www content?
• Is the TLD staying the same and only the subdomain changing?

Ideally, everything would be added to the production site and redirected all at once.

However, if that isn't an option I'd probably try to implement the redirects from www to ww2 incrementally as well. Otherwise, Google will be able to crawl/index content from both the www and ww2 subdomains, leading to duplicate content issues. I'd try to keep the website architecture fairly consistent between the two so preserve the UX/equity signals between the two subdomains.

It's tough to give insights without more information, so I'd be happy to chat more about this!