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Thank you for a detailed response.

It's a second scenario. Domain/hosting will stay stays for old domain and all redirects will point to relevant destination pages in our main website. We already performed a massive hybrid migration (main site ) that delivered a CMS change, site structure/URL change and content cut without losing any traffic (we actually gained north of 30% increase in post-migration period). Migration was done over 3 month period and it was done right. This time, the project was conceived and nearly finished in the bubble and got into my attention way too late.

I have an interesting problem I would like to pick someone else’s brain.

Our business has over 80 different products, each with a dedicated page (specs, gallery, copy etc.) on the main website. Main site itself, is used for presentation purpose only and doesn’t offer a direct path to purchase. A few years ago, to serve a specific customer segment, we have created a site where customers can perform a quick purchase via one of our major strategic partners. Now we are looking to migrate this old legacy service, site and all its pages under the new umbrella (main domain/CMS).

Problem #1 Redirects/ relevancy/ SEO equity

Ideally, we could simply perform 1:1 - 301 redirect from old legacy product pages to the relevant new site products pages. The problem is that Call to action (buy), some images and in some cases, parts of the copy must be changed to some degree to accommodate this segment. The second problem is in our dev and creative team. There are not enough resources to dedicate for the creation of the new pages so we can perform 1:1 301 redirects.

So, the potential decision is to redirect a visitor to the dynamic page URL where parent product page will be used to apply personalization rules and a new page with dynamic content (buy button, different gallery etc.) is displayed to the user (see attached diagram). If we redirect directly to parent URL and then apply personalization rules, URL will stay the same and this is what we are trying to avoid (we must mention in the URL that user is on purchase path, otherwise this redirect and page where the user lands, can be seen as deceptive). Also Dynamic pages will have static URLs and unique page/title tag and meta description.

Problem #2 : Indexation/Canonicalization

The dynamic page is canonicalized to the parent page and does have nearly identical content/look and feel, but both serve a different purpose and we want both indexed in search.

Hope my explanation is clear and someone can chip in. Any input is greatly appreciated!

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Hi Everyone,

We just did a site migration ( URL structure change, site redesign, CMS change). During migration, dev team messed up badly on a few things including SEO.

• The old site had pages canonicalized and self canonicalized <> New site doesn't have anything (CMS dev error) so we are working retroactively to add canonicalization mechanism
• The legacy site had URL’s ending with a trailing slash “/” <> new site got redirected to Set of url’s without “/”

New site action :

• All robots are allowed:
• A new sitemap is submitted to google search console

So here is my problem (it been a long 24hr night for me  )

1. Now when I look at GSC homepage URL it says that old page is self canonicalized and currently in index (old page with a trailing slash at the end of URL).

2. When I try to perform a live URL test, I get the message "No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag" , so indexation cant be done. I have no idea where noindex is coming from.

3. Robots.txt in search console still showing old file ( no noindex there ) I tried to submit new file but old one still coming up. When I click on "See live robots.txt" I get current robots.

4. I see that old page is still canonicalized and attempting to index redirected old page might be confusing google

Hope someone can help to get the new page indexed! I really need it   Please ping me if you need more clarification.

Thank you !

Thank you

Thank you for the quick reply.

Yes, that's right (URLs and page look from 2017. The site was old and neglected. We decided to give it a facelift, sunset domain in a few months and bring site under our main site.

While pages were still in development (but migrated from staging to live site), we needed to protect them from accidental indexation and flagged every page "no index" no follow".  Is it possible that google crawled pages in the past, got no index(as was set at that time) and never returned back? If that's' the case, should I manually request indexing?