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Hi Aran, thanks for your response.

My thinking has also evolved a bit and I'm now thinking we ought to exclude the new site until we're ready to cut over as @EGOL suggested.

The critical info I didn't mention before was that there is important client ROI and reporting reasons that we need to ensure that the current site continues to perform right up until the cut over, at which point the 301s will be implemented. The cross domain canonical would address the dupliaction, but would also start to depreciate the current pages prematurely.

The thing that I was underestimating before was the negative impression that the new domain would give Google when it suddenly appeared with 1M+ pages of duplicate content plus no real link profile of its own (until we implement the 301s)...all the hallmarks of a scraper.

Better I think to avoid this by excluding the beta until we cut over, and make sure we prep well for that.

Building on @EGOL suggestions agree it is important to get the tone set from the beginning. To this end there is nothing wrong with soliciting the help of your own network early on...you can cajol them into providing good entries to start with. Once you have some good content you can look at some tactical local PR, local newspapers and websites.

How you actually execute it is also going to be important, making it very easy to pass along. I'm personally bullish on FB powered commenting. Again getting your network to start interacting with the content this way will help socialize it on FB.

FB advertising may also be a good way to seed the comp.

Thanks very much for your thoughts. The root of my uncertainty is indeed the way Google in particular is viewing duplciated content today.

What if I told you that the site was a business directory and that the new site would be a big improvement in terms of on page optimization? By which I mean new/different (and much better) page titles and improved internal linking. I mention this only because the new site won't a direct replicar of the old one. Make a difference?

Imagine you have a large site on an aged and authoritative domain.

For commercial reasons the site has to be moved to a new domain, and in the process is going to be revamped significantly. Not an ideal starting scenario obviously to be biting off so much all at once, but unavoidable.

The plan is to run the new site in beta for about 4 weeks, giving users the opportunity to play with it and provide feedback. After that there will be a hard cut over with all URLs permanently redirected to the new domain.

The hard cut over is necessary due to business continuity reasons, and real complexity in trying to maintain complex UI and client reporting over multiple domains. Of course we'll endeavour to mitigate the impact of the change by telling G about the change in WMC and ensuring we monitor crawl errors etc etc.

My question is whether we should allow the new site to be indexed during the beta period?

My gut feeling is yes for the following reasons:

• It's only 4 weeks and until such time as we start redirecting the old site the new domain won't have much whuffie so there's next to no chance the site will ranking for anything much.

• Give Googlebot a headstart on indexing a lot of URLs so they won't all be new when we cut over the redirects

Is that sound reasoning? Is the duplication during that 4 week beta period likely to have some negative impact that I am underestimating?