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Hi James, a question, do you want all the old pages simply to redirect to the new "home page" or do you have new versions of the old pages on your new domain?  While I lack the detailed programming knowledge of Naghirniac; it seems to me that you should have a think about whether you want visitors who land on the old site's blue widget's page (assuming there is any traffic or link juice flowing in) to be redirected to a new version of blue widgets page on the new domain; rather than just a blanket transfer to the home page?  If that's the case and you aren't talking thousands of pages then maybe redirects from each page would be worth thinking about?

Good luck anyhow!

Blimey gustav - that was quick.   In the htaccess do you need to specify each separtae page url or is there a way of setting it site wide?

Many thanks for taking the time to answer.

Ray

Where an existing website has duplicate content issues - specifically the www. and non-www. type; what is the most effective way to inform the searchers and spiders that there is only one page?

I have a site where the ecommerce software (Shopfitter 4) allows a fair bit of meta data to be inserted into each product page but I am uncertain, after a couple of attempts to deduplicate some pages, which is the most effective way to ensure that the www related duplication is eliminated sitewide - there is such a solution.

I have to own up to having looked at

,htaccess

301 redirects

webmaster tools

and become increasingly bamboozled by the conflicting advice as to which is the most effective way or combination to get rid of this problem.  too olod to learn new tricks I reckon

Your help and clarification would be appreciated as this may help head off more fruitless work.

The site in question is stanwix.info.

I set this up years ago as a community project before I had even heard of seo.  It carries quite a bit of content but has appallingly "SEO Unfriendly" URLs  some content is recorded as duplicate 3 or more times because of these dynamic URLs according to the crawl statistics returned by SEO Moz.

Currently it ranks well for the keyword stanwix - not too surprising as the only significant local competition is a large commercial holiday complex located several miles away out on the coast.

As a sort of showcase, I have been trying to come up with a strategy to re-optimise stanwix.info so that it can outdo the commercial site stanwix.com  I am pretty sure that step 1 involcves upgrading from the current archaic version of Joomla to the latest release even though that will break some of the modules currently installed. My pal who actually coded the site did a fair bit of hacking of the modules to get them to work properly.

OR

do I simply bin it and start a fresh site consigning years worth of community content to the darkness and replace with fresh material - I'm not keen on this option as I have put a lot of heart and soul into this project.   I am in a quandary here as the problems are so numerous that whatever I do will break the site for some time.

The reason I want to keep the site is because the business directory provides a useful locally relevant source of links for other clients and I am also going to set up a separate website for the community centre on a subdomain - this time running in wordpress which I do have a fair bit of experience with.

Your advice for my addled brain would be much appreciated.

Thanks EGOL, that's in line with what I thought.  One of them does produce a small flow of visitors.  My inclination is to recommend editing the content on that satellite to reflect its keyword and only link in to the couple of relevant sub categories at the main site.  All other non relevant content would be removed

The others I would redirect to the appropriate internal page of the website.

All the best and thanks again.

A reasonably large ecommerce site I am working with has multiple duplicate content issues.

On 4 or 5 keyword domains related to site content  the owners simply duplicated the home page with category links pushing visitors to the category pages of the main site.

There was no canonical URL instruction, so have set preferred url via webmaster tools but now need to code this into the website itself.

For a reasonably large ecommerce site, how would you approach that particular nest of troubles.  That's even before we get to grips with the on page duplication and wrong keywords!