Gradual roll out of new webpages on temporary subdomain
-
I’m working for a company who is looking to gradually replace an existing website with a new website.
They will replace the homepage, then a section, then another section, and so on, until the new site is complete.
All new pages will sit on a temporary subdomain.
So, for example, the URL for the homepage at the moment is www.domain.com, but as soon as the new homepage is ready, that will be launched on a temporary URL / subdomain - www2.domain.com - replacing the old homepage.
The new pages will then gradually increase on www2.domain.com (so journeys will inevitably move across domains) until the whole of the new website is ready on www2.domain.com - at which point it will move on to www.domain.com.
I know this isn’t a good way of doing things - I would much prefer the new site is completely built and then it just replaces the old site with the necessary 301 redirects in place - but the company wants to see the gradual roll out of new page designs.
So, my question is, what’s the best way to manage this without negatively impacting rankings for the existing domain (www.domain.com)?
-
The most important is to redirect all your backlinks via 301 to the new URLs. As you've been told, why not develop the entire site in the subdomain and then move it to the new one, so you don't play with redirects and traffic from one subdomain to another.
-
I'm not sure how the search engines look at 302 redirects which are in place for a prolonged time. I'll be interested to see if anyone else on this thread has additional insights about that. What I can say is that I've used 302 redirects in some cases for prolonged period of time (although not as long as 12-18 months, perhaps more like 4-6 months) and have not experienced issues from that approach. But others on this forum may have more experience with 302 redirects over that period of time.
The other thing I'll mention is that some tools like Moz Pro will report 302 Redirects as "issues". My perspective is to look through these because some might be unintentional, and then to ignore when they are inentional/strategic.
-
Hi seoelevated,
Thanks for your response. I have been considering a 302 approach, but I am concerned about how long I can leave 302s in place. If from start to finish, the roll out takes 12 - 18 months, will that cause any problems?
Thanks!
-
Unless I'm missing something in the thread here, it seems to me this would be better served by 302. My rationale is that you will be eventually going back to the www URL and you want that to retain the full equity of all its links. So, during the interim period, you would have 302 redirects, and then when you switch back to www, you would simply remove all the redirects.
The only downside I see to that is that during the interim period, one thing you won't be able to measure as the site is gradually updated, is the incremental impact of the new page designs on SEO. You will still be able to measure the new page design in terms of conversion rate and other UX factors, but measuring impact on SEO wouldn't really be feasible.
-
Yes, I got it. That's the only option to do this if you want to pass link juice to www2.domain.com while you are working on the new site. There is no way to not lose traffic if you want to redirect everything on the page by page basis. Traffic will bounce back after you move back to www.domain.com, but it can takes time.
Ross
-
Hi Ross.
Everything will have a 301.
For example:
- When I launch the new homepage on the temporary subdomain, I will add a 301 redirect from www.domain.com to www2.domain.com.
- When I launch a new section page, I will add a new 301 redirect from www.domain.com/section1 to www2.domain.com/section1.
- When I launch a new product page, I will add a new 301 redirect from www.domain.com/product1 to www2.domain.com/product1.
And then, eventually, when everything is moved back to the www domain, I will setup the following 301 redirects:
- Homepage - From www2.domain.com to www.domain.com
- Section page - From www2.domain.com/section1 to www.domain.com/section1
- Product page - From www2.domain.com/product1 to www.domain.com/product1
Does this make sense? So, everything will have a 301 redirect.
I'm just concerned about the fact I'm basically having to 301 redirect a whole site away from it's original domain to a temporary subdomain, and then back again. Should I be concerned about this?
-
The only problem I see here that you will lose traffic by setting 301s to www2 and then removing those 301s.
Ross
-
Hi Ross.
Thanks again for the response.
There will only ever be one version of a page, and each time an old page is replaced with a new version, I will 301 redirect from the www version to the www2 version.
My concern is, at the end of the web build all pages on www will have been 301 redirected to www2, and then I’ll need to 301 redirect them all back again to www when the new site is moved off the temporary subdomain. Do you see any problems with this approach?
-
If not then I would deindex completely the www2.domain.com and do not set up any redirects at all. Just have your www.domain.com working in a normal way until you migrate your www2.domain.com to www.domain.com. Also, If you planning to change the URLs on the new version of the website then you need to set up 301 redirects from old URLs to new URLs on your server ( apache or ngnix) so you do not get any broken links.
Ross
-
Are you planning to have both versions of the site working at the same time?
Ross
-
Thanks for the response.
But is it okay to 301 redirect, for example, the homepage to a temporary www2 subdomain, and then back again once the whole site is ready to move back to the www domain?
-
Hi there,
The most important is to redirect all your backlinks via 301 to the new URLs. Also, you can take a look at this guide.
Ross
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
-
Subdomain or Country Code Top Level Domain
Hello Friends, I am planning to develop my website for other languages. which one is best for SEO? (The main English website is well ranked in google) 1. de.example.com (subdomain may obtain rank faster as it is part of the main website?)
Web Design | | Bold
2. example.de (this is a completely new one; so not easy to get rank?) thank you
Barsbold0 -
Show new mobile site to 60% users & old mobile site to 40% users
Hi, We are planning to show new mobile site to 60% users & old mobile site to 40% users. We will show the old site to google crawler. Our old site has some interlinking through footer & content whereas the new site does not has it. We wanted to do this since our new site does not supports some browsers. Will there be an issue with Google on showing the site like this. The mobile site & desktop site will have same url across devices & browsers. Regards
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
Duplicate Content? Designing new site, but all content got indexed on developer's sandbox
An ecommerce I'm helping is getting a complete redesign. Their developer had a sandbox version of their new site for design & testing. Several thousand products were loaded into the sandbox site. Then Google/Bing crawled and indexed the site (because developer didn't have a robots.txt), picking up and caching about 7,200 pages. There were even 2-3 orders placed on the sandbox site, so people were finding it. So what happens now?
Web Design | | trafficmotion
When the sandbox site is transferred to the final version on the proper domain, is there a duplicate content issue?
How can the developer fix this?0 -
New website and new domain
Hi, We have a domain with current e-commerce site on, about 5 years old. We have a new website being built with a different company and a new domain name. We are transferring our old domain over to new provider and 301'ing the domain to new domain. However, we can not take the current website with us, so we lose all our links/pages etc.. How important would it be to take a wrap of our current website to keep all the pages alive? Is there anything we can do so oldurl.com/brand/tshirt/ doesnt lose its rank? Can we 301 individual pages if we dont have the actual website? Just the domain name. Any help be great. Thanks
Web Design | | YNWA0 -
SEO Searchable? Starting a New Forum for Company Community
Hi Mozzers, I'm new here and am looking forward to learning from this awesome group of SEOs As my company's Web Optimization Manager, I'm in charge of just about anything SEO related. We are an education company and we are looking to build a new forum so students (both new and old) and continue interacting within our community. We also want to use this as a tool for new users and potential new customers through search (obviously). We are in an internal debate as to how we should make the forums and the implications on search it may have. Some managers want the content available only to members, others want the content read-only to the public, and the tech team building the forum says that "it'll be an issue making the content available to the public without a log-in." So my questions are: (1) Will we still be searchable if we make our content "read-only" for non-members? Members will have the ability to log-in and comment and post etc (similar to this forum). (2) Will be searchable if we make the content completely private and available only to members. What I mean by private is perhaps, we'll make the title of the forum thread public but not the actual responses. Along these lines, what would happen if we made everything private (including the tite). Will Google still pick up on our content in a search result and a potential user only not be able to see anything? (3) What would you all suggest to make this flow the right way? Hope to hear from you all soon. Thanks
Web Design | | Pedram_SEO1 -
Having a new website build, what happens to my SEO work?
Hi, We are in the process of having a new website developed by a web agency. New domain, new business name etc... What is the best process to transfer from old domain to the new one? What happens to all my ranked URLs? What can re-directs do to help me? Will I loose all my link juice on highly ranked keyword domains? I ranked 1st for a brand now, wil lthis go? Any advice, help or hints would be great. Thanks Will
Web Design | | YNWA0 -
What is the new Google SERP highlighting?
My question is with the new Google SERP. I posted a pic of it at http://www.hortonwebdesign.com/images/new-google-page.gif. If you mouse over the arrows to the right of a result on the SERP, it pops up a preview of the page. On some results it also highlights a section of the page with a red box. What does this represent? Does it represent a key area that they are looking at in determining the positioning? I have some clients that are asking me and it doesn't make a lot of sense. In my example above I searched for "seo expert in georgia" and on my result (I'm #2), it shows a preview, but the part it has chosen to highlight with a red box is just, um, ...useless. It's highlighting a Recent Post sidebar on the right halfway down the page. Surely this can't be what they're looking at as what they view as "useful" to that search. This simply can't be what they're using to determine positioning. Or is it? Just please explain what I'm seeing here. new-google-page.gif.
Web Design | | GeorgiaSEOServices0 -
Will opening in a New Window pass all link juice?
Hey guys, We're in the middle of designing our core navigation for our new site, which will feature a blog. I want to make sure the blog is linked to from the main navigation to pass all of the link juice to it, but since it isn't the core feature of the site we want people to view, I don't want it to take attention away from other things. Due to this I am thinking about giving it a main navigation link that opens in a new window. It would still be reachable from every page on the site, but it would allow users to view the blog in a new window rather than leaving the main site. The blog will still be on the same domain in a domain.com/blog subfolder. My question is... is this good practice? Will this pass the necessary link juice from our root domain to our blog, or will opening it in a new window detract from the value of the link? Any other comments / issues with designing the navigation like this that I'm not thinking of would be appreciated! Thanks
Web Design | | CodyWheeler0