Am I missing something if I absorb one site into another?
-
We are absorbing one of our sites into another and I want to make sure I am not missing anything. The site that is being absorbed will no longer exist as all the content has been replicated/duplicated on the main site.
About a month ago we added canonicals to all the duplicate content to point to the new site it will be a part of. That went very well and organic traffic continued to flow to those pages on the new site.
We recently (yesterday) used 301s on all the pages using mod_rewrites and redirected the domain name from the old site name to the new one. Using mod_rewrites we redirect any other page linking to that domain to www.newsite.com?ref=oldsite.com. So far I dont see anything coming in on an unexpected link.
I still need to tell Google via Webmaster Tools that the oldsite is now on newsite.com correct?
Is there anything else I might bump into that we havent thought of?
Thanks
-
I think WMT is sometimes annoying about it, but it makes sense. If you're pointing the whole site to a different site, I guess it makes sense that they want to verify you control the domain, and not just that one specific subdomain.
One other thing I would do is review your backlink profile - if there are some juicy links in there that you want to preserve and not lose some of their strength due to 301 depletion, I'd contact the webmasters and inform them of the change, asking them to update their links to the new URL to make sure you don't encounter any issues in the future.
-
Well, to help the situation. I tried to use WBT to redirect and got this error message.
We couldn't verify oldsite.com. To submit a change of address, oldsite.com must be verified using the same method as www.oldsite.com. Add oldsite.com to your account and verify ownership, then try again.
I had www.oldsite.com in WBT and used it fine all the time. Is it because my DNS has already taken over and it cant find the verification file on the oldsite?
Update, I was able to add a site in WBT for oldsite.com and verify it. Then I was able to move www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com (oldsite.com is also moved to www.newsite.com)
To move a site you need both www.site.com and site.com in WBT and verified? I did not know that.
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
-
Launch of improved site
Hi, Just want to ask you guys if i have missed something in my planning. We have done a migration from Ithemes Exchange to woocommerce. The complete migration are done on our dev server. It has an exakt setup as our live one. My plan is to change our live version with a backup from our migrated and finished site from our dev site. All of our product links will be intact with accept from some that we have combined in to new ones, the ones that are changed has been redirected with a 301. Will this way of launching our site effect our ranking/seo in some way? Thankful for any thoughts about this one! // Jonas
Technical SEO | | knubbz0 -
Representing categories on my site
My site serves a consumer-focused industry that has about 15-20 well recognized categories, which act as a pretty obvious way to segment our content. Each category supports it's own page (with some useful content) and a series of articles relevant to that category. In short, the categories are pretty focal to what we do. I am moving from DNN to WordPress as my CMS/blog. I am taking the opportunity to review and fix SEO-related issues as I migrate. One such area is my URL structure. On my existing site (on DNN), I have the following types of pages for each topic: / <topic>- this is essentially the landing page for the topic and links to articles</topic> /<topic>/articles/ <article-name>- topics have 3-15 articles with this URL structure</article-name></topic> With WordPress, I am considering moving to articles being under the root. So, an article on (making this up) how to make a widget would be under /how-to-make-a-widget, instead of /<widgets>/article/how-to-make-a-widget I will be using WordPress categories to reflect the topics taxonomy, so I can flag my articles using standard WordPress concepts.</widgets> Anyway, I'm trying to get my head around whether it makes sense to "flatten" my URL structure such that the URLs for each article no longer include the topic (the article page will link to the topic page though). Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | MarkWill1 -
HTML Site for Speed
I have a few small sites and landing pages on Wordpress that I want to load a lot quicker than they do. It occurred to me that if there is not a lot of content management necessary, I should simply make the static web pages straight html instead of trying all the modifications necessary to get some Wordpress sites and themes to load quicker. I have noticed the html sites I have load lighting fast on slow hosting service. Is this a good idea, can anyone think of drawbacks to it? Security? Responsiveness? SEO? And what about taking some company's sites with blog straight html so the home page loads quick, and then using Wordpress for the blog?
Technical SEO | | phogan0 -
Rewrite rules from one domain to another one
I have moved he site from a server to another one, changing the domain name. The page names are the same, so in every urls you will have only a differnce in the domain name not in the rest of url. I would like to use rewriterule in the htaccess file to tell to everyone, especially to search engines, that I have now new urls. I have found this code, but I'm not sure it could be the right one in my case RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^(.+)$ http://nuovodominio/$1 [R=301] Thanks to anyone could help me. Ciao, bob
Technical SEO | | bobrock40 -
Hit by a penalty? But which one?
Hi guys, First off, thanks for reading my post! My site, www.doctorloanusa.com suffered a massive drop in Google rankings and traffic on September 27. For the past 4 years, I've ranked in spots 1-3. My main keywords are physician loans and doctor loans. I had a competitor copy almost ALL my text. In early October, I filed a DMCA takedown and had the infringing site removed from the SERPS. I also made text changes to my site. I thought this duplicate content was the problem, but I have yet to see any improvements 2 months later. My site isn't particularly deep content-wise, but it's competitive with others in my niche. I have relatively few links but others in the SERPS have very similar link profiles. I tried to clean up a few questionable links and used the disavow tool. I have used the SEOmoz on-page tools to grade my site. Typically, I receive grade A reports. I still rank for my website URL, and still rank 1 in both Yahoo and Bing. My bounce rate is 43%. If anyone could provide insight, I would be very grateful. I need to get this site ranking again, as this property is my main source of income. Is the site over-optimized? Is it my anchor text profile? Thank you very much in advance!
Technical SEO | | Cary_Forest0 -
Google Custom Site Search
I am an admin on a google custom site search account. I am also the owner of a verified webmaster tools account for the same site. The Custom Search control panel will not let me add URL's or a Site map for on demand indexing, but says "you must submit a sitemap of your own verified sites". Has anyone else has this issue? Does the Owner of the custom search account have to be the owner of the webmaster account, or can the logged in admin be? Thanks
Technical SEO | | SEMPassion0 -
Google has not been visiting my site
Hi I am working on a site at the moment http://www.cheapflightsgatwick.com and i had the site using a different template and in the search engines for the search term cheap flights gatwick we were fourth and for the term holiday magazine we were 12th in google but now we are not even in google on the first page for the search terms. But now after changing the template in joomla our rankings have gone out of the window. It took me about a day to sort out the site with the new template so i was not expecting any problems with the search engines but for some reason there is. If you put into the search engine www.cheapflightsgatwick.com then you will see that google has not visited the site for four days and also it is not showing the description and instead it is showing details about joomla. Can anyone let me know if there is anything i need to do to sort this out and why google is taking so long to visit my site
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Can I noindex most of my site?
A large number of the pages on my site are pages that contain things like photos and maps that are useful to my visitors, but would make poor landing pages and have very little written content. My site is huge. Would it be benificial to noindex all of these?
Technical SEO | | mascotmike0