Thanks for helping Malika! To clarify for other readers, blocking in robots.txt after the pages have been indexed will actually prevent them from being removed from the index with a meta noindex tag, since Google won't be able to crawl the pages to see the noindex tag.

If staging URLs have been indexed already (and assuming they still need to exist), here's the steps I would take:

1. Add meta noindex tags to every staging URLs
2. If urgent, also do a URL removal request in Webmaster Tools (but this is usually not needed)
3. Wait until the staging URLs are noindexed - you can check periodically by doing site: searches in Google.
4. Only after they are noindexed, block Search Engines from crawling them with the robots.txt file.

Hi There

I would question if that's the best setup/solution for an architecture issue? What's the issue exactly?

Google might index the hello.html page, but you also risk confusing Google. How many URLs are being redirect / canonicolized in this manner? Are we talking about 10 or 100's?

I take it Google has not indexed any hello.html URLs yet? How long have they been live and accessible?

Hi Stuart

There could be many nuances to every situation (essentially, what type of sites they are and what type of content it is), but in general I'd go with what's most user-friendly - what will reduce any confusion, and send old traffic to the new home of the acquired company. A subdomain is fine if you want to clearly show to users a distinction between the acquiring vs acquired site.

Definitely do your 301 redirects. I would highly recommend reading up on Cyrus' article here about 301 redirects. In general, the content should be basically the same from the old page to the new page being redirected to. I would try to migrate the site "as is" as much as possible to eliminate other factors/changes that could affect things. You can update things later, but this was it makes it easier to analyze if any rankings are lost. In other words, be systematic and keep track of when/what you change.

Thanks for helping Dirk!

Dirk's suggestions are perfect. In addition, I would add a few things.

First just to check, this is your real new logo now? http://fi.realself.com/images/layout/logo.png?1398004321

When you do the image search in Google, just look at where all the old images are located. For example I would go through ALL of the results, not just Dr Ellen - like this one shows up for me: http://www.elitemdspa.com/realself-testimonials/

Contact all websites that are using your old logo and ask them to update to the new one.

However, you should allow Google to crawl your JavaScript and CSS (which is now blocked). Here's some background info on that:

• https://moz.com/blog/why-all-seos-should-unblock-js-css
• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.html

Hi Riccardo

Yes to confirm the site is indexed and crawlable. Checking the number of URLs from a sitemap that are indexed isn't the most reliable way to see if you content is indexed. You can do a site: search on your domain in Google like this as probably one of the most reliable ways. Also, you can try jus crawling the site with a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider - and if the tool can crawl everything, there may be just a delay on Google's end. But in your case now, all looks good!

-Dan

Thanks Moosa! Just want to clarify a few points to be sure they don't get mis-understood by other readers:

Duplicate content

• just want to make sure they know, although duplicate content is not the best thing, there is no penalty per se

Cross Domain Canonical

• search engines will in fact crawl both versions. They will just not index the one with the canonical tag pointing to the source page.

Hi Lehia

Given that your site has relatively low domain authority right now of 17 and to eliminate user (and your) confusion, I would 301 redirect every individual blog URL to the corresponding new URL on the new domain. It's possible you may lose some ranking - but let me ask:

• how much traffic do you get from the blog right now?
• I bet there's a typical 80/20 pattern where maybe a small handful of blog URLs are getting more of the traffic?

Point being, I would really do what's best in the long-term and to consolidate your brands/domains. I've performed and seen many migrations perfectly fine.

One last thing!

1. Crawl your old site or somehow gather up the old URLs from the old domain
2. Throw them in Screaming Frog in List mode
3. Export the "Redirect Chain" report
4. And undo any redirect chains

I talk about that a little here.

Also, make sure you continue to allow Google to crawl the old domain (don't block it with robots.txt).

Hi John

Did ATP's solution help you out? Let us know if we can look into this further!