Moving Duplicate Sites
-
Apologies in advance for the complexity.
My client, company A, has purchased company B in the same industry, with A and B having separate domains. Current hosting arrangement combines registrar and hosting functions in 1 account so as to allow both domains to point to a common folder, with the result that identical content is displayed for both A & B. The current site is kind of an amalgam of A and B.
Company A has decided to rebrand and completely absorb company B. The problem is that link value overwhelmingly favours B over A.
The current (only) hosting package is Windows, and I am creating a new site and moving them to Linux with another hosting company. I can use 301's for A , but not for B as it is a separate domain and currently shares a hosting package with A.
How can I best preserve the link juice that domain B has? The only conclusion I can come up with is to set up separate Linux hosting for B which will allow for the use of 301's.
Does anyone have a better idea?
-
A pleasure Wayne! (If you get stuck with the web hosting issue I'm sure we can arrange a whip round for you! ;o)
-
Blimey! How tight are her purse strings ;o)
As you could get away with next to no space for this if you are happy to redirect using just a .htaccess file you are going to need a very small hosting package if you chose that method.
I think I would specifically request it by email and explain why it is required and the detriment of NOT having it and ask her in the email if she can approve the purchase - essentially make her say 'YES, not problem' (and get the problem sorted quickly) or 'NO, not happening' (and leave the ball in her court - when people kick off in the top offices!)
If you are tasked to do a job (and expected to do it well!) then you can't be denied the tools you need to carry out the task - without someone else putting their neck on the block (in writing!)
-
Thanks to both of you, as this validates my logic.
-
Nothing preventing me per se, but in spite of this being a reasonably sized company, I deal with a marketing manager who doesn't understand the importance here. My real challenge here will be to convince her that it's important enough to set up another hosting account
-
If there anything preventing you from moving site B into an environment where you can control it and 301 ing it from there?
EDIT: Ahh, it looks like you consider that as your best option currently - based on the comments right at the end of your post?
Migrating Site B into an environment you can control as you wish makes perfect sense to me and create all the 301s to your new Site A when migration is complete - you should be able to do this pretty seamlessly - as you don't need to worry about the bulk of the site itself - just a change of nameserver and point it to a server that contains your already mapped out 301'd .htaccess file?
-
The problem is that link value overwhelmingly favours B over A.
Looks like you have a great opportunity to increase the rankings of A.
I have done this using the same method that you described. We did a page-by-page 301 redirect of B to A - but all was on my own server that allowed multiple accounts - so no added cost.
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
-
My beta site (beta.website.com) has been inadvertently indexed. Its cached pages are taking traffic away from our real website (website.com). Should I just "NO INDEX" the entire beta site and if so, what's the best way to do this? Please advise.
My beta site (beta.website.com) has been inadvertently indexed. Its cached pages are taking traffic away from our real website (website.com). Should I just "NO INDEX" the entire beta site and if so, what's the best way to do this? Are there any other precautions I should be taking? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | BVREID0 -
Cross links between sites
hi, We have several ecommerce sites and we cross linked 3 of them by mistake. We realize that the sites were linked through WMT, We have shut down 2 of the sites about 2 months ago, but WMT still shows the links coming from those 2 sites. how do we make sure that google will see the sites are shut down. Is there a better of way resolving this issue. We are no longer using those sites, so do not need them to be active. whats the best solution to show google that the links are no longer there. Crawler shows that it was able to crawl the site 45 days after it is shut down. thanks nick
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
Duplicate page content
Hello, My site is being checked for errors by the PRO dashboard thing you get here and some odd duplicate content errors have appeared. Every page has a duplicate because you can see the page and the page/~username so... www.short-hairstyles.com is the same as www.short-hairstyles.com/~wwwshor I don't know if this is a problem or how the crawler found this (i'm sure I have never linked to it). But I'd like to know how to prevent it in case it is a problem if anyone knows please? Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Should Canonical be used if your site does not have any duplicate
Should canonical be used site wide even if my site is solid no duplicate content is generated. please explain your answer
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
Site Disappeared off of Search
A friend of mine has a site (http://bit.ly/q4iWkM ) that was ranking number one for their key word (Drimnagh() and has now completely disappeared off of the ranking. I did some checking and can't see a problem. She does have duplicate meta and titles throughout but this shouldn't be a punishable offence that I know of and is something that I am going to correct with a quick plugin install. I couldn't see any redirects or code stopping search either. When you do site:URL it shows up OK as well. She is client of mine (for website not for SEO) and she is really upset about it so any help from the forum would be appreciated. This isn't even a site I did but you couldn't get a better person to work with so I am eager to help where and if possible. Guinness all round if someone solves it next time you are in Ireland
Technical SEO | | kdaly1000 -
Duplicate content
I am getting flagged for duplicate content, SEOmoz is flagging the following as duplicate: www.adgenerator.co.uk/ www.adgenerator.co.uk/index.asp These are obviously meant to be the same path so what measures do I take to let the SE's know that these are to be considered the same page. I have used the canonical meta tag on the Index.asp page.
Technical SEO | | IPIM0 -
Up to my you-know-what in duplicate content
Working on a forum site that has multiple versions of the URL indexed. The WWW version is a top 3 and 5 contender in the google results for the domain keyword. All versions of the forum have the same PR, but but the non-WWW version has 3,400 pages indexed in google, and the WWW has 2,100. Even worse yet, there's a completely seperate domain (PR4) that has the forum as a subdomain with 2,700 pages indexed in google. The dupe content gets completely overwhelming to think about when it comes to the PR4 domain, so I'll just ask what you think I should do with the forum. Get rid of the subdomain version, and sometimes link between two obviously related sites or get rid of the highly targeted keyword domain? Also what's better, having the targeted keyword on the front of Google with only 2,100 indexed pages or having lower rankings with 3,400 indexed pages? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Hondaspeder0