Page authority old and new website

[stepsstones]

Dear all,

I tried to find this question using the search option but cannot find the exact same problem.

This is the thing: I launched a new website in January, replacing our old website that did pretty good in the SERPs. The old website is still running on a subdomain old.website.com and the new website is on www.website.com (www.denhollandsche.nl)

Both sites are indexed by google right now, but I'm not sure if that's a good thing. For our main keyword, the page on the new website has an authority of "23" and the exact same page (some minor differences) on the old website still has an authority of "30". Both currently are on the second page of google while some time ago, they where still on position 2/3/4.

My question is: if I would take down the old website and make a 301 redirect for the old page with P/A 30, to point to the new page with a P/A 23, will the p/a of this new page take over the P/A of the old page? What effects can I expect?

The reason the old website is still running is that google images still shows images from old.domain.com in stead of images from the new website...

Thanks for your help guys!

[stepsstones]

Thanks Andy! I know what to do now! Let's mark this question as 'answered!'

[SEOAndy]

Thats correct.

Ok my suggestion is to 301 your old.domain to your www.domain AND add the whole subdomain old.domain to robots.txt to ban indexing of that subdomain. Once the domain itself is gone from search results delete the files or back them up etc etc...

As for image search as long as you've pointed old urls to new ones you should be fine

[stepsstones]

Ah ok I understand. The old.domain pages indeed are the former www.domain pages and the for each of the old www pages, a redirect to the new www.domain URL is in place in the .htaccess. However, the old www pages are now running on the subdomain old.domain.com and are indexed again by Google and if I now understand correctly, are actually competing with our new domain website that is running on the www.domain.com.

[SEOAndy]

I assume that your website curerntly in old.domain was formerly of www. my question is do the 301's you have in place point to old.domain or to the new page within www.domain ?

[stepsstones]

Thanks a lot Tom and Andy. The info is really useful, and as the html code and structure of the pages is a lot better than from the old site, there is nothing else that I could think of that is causing our positions to drop...

There is one part I do not fully understand:

"is the new website structure sat on top of old urls which are redirected to the new site or old site?"

Could you explain what you mean by this?

Thanks again for your help!

[TomRayner]

Hey Martijn

Let's address this in 2 parts:

First, if you 301 redirected the page with the higher authority, in theory the new page will receive that authority and your score could go up. The 301 tells Google to pass the link equity of the old URL to the new URL and in the SEOMoz crawler this is replicated. If you look at websites that have had old domains 301'd to the new root domain, you can see the old links that point to the old URL come up as links for the new URL. With that in mind, you can expect that the SEOMoz crawler will pass the authority on as well.

Now, as for whether or not you should do this - I think you should straight away. If it subdomain is just showing images this may not apply, but by having the 2 versions of the website live you may be running the risk of having duplicate content.  If this is the case, this could severely harm your site's ranking, so I'd address it straight away with a 301 redirect or by rewriting the content.

Another potential issue, and one that might explain why your rankings have dropped to page 2, is that you are "cannibalising" your keywords. By having similar content, title tags etc - even if it is not technically duplicate - you could be confusing the search engine crawlers. It may not know which page to prioritise.

Now, if the images that are showing up on Google images are attracting a healthy amount of traffic, I would think twice about redirecting straight away. You may want to leave it where it is, but adjust the copy and on-page elements to ensure that you're not cannibalising your keywords.  Having said that, the links to that page, which may be ranking it highly in Google images, could theoretically work again if 301 redirected, as all link equity is passed when you do so.

Overall, I'd keep things neat and simple for the user and have 1 version of the site, implementing a 301 redirect to the appropriate new URLs. Include the images on these equivalent new URLs.

[SEOAndy]

Ok a few things here to talk about.

PA won't instantly move across, just as "page rank" and other ranking factors wouldn't. What would happen though is that a large portion of the link worth from the old urls would move the the new ones - though this raises the question... is the new website structure sat on top of old urls which are redirected to the new site or old site? ... if the first great if the later move them to the new urls and slowly watch PA move across.

In terms of images being indexed, they will remain in the index and searchable for sometime after deletion, also when they try to send someone across to the page with it on - if you've 301'd it correctly it will be a link to the new site and product anyhow and also Google will find that image again to index. (hope that makes sense).

In all honesty you set up sound a little odd, I would suggest making the move sooner rather than later to ensure you don't get a duplicate content issue too.