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
-
Content from Another Site
Hi there - I have a client that says they'll be "serving content by retrieving it from another URL using loadHTMLFile, performing some manipulations on it, and then pushing the result to the page using saveHTML()." Just wondering what the SEO implications of this will be. Will search engines be able to crawl the retrieved content? Is there a downside (I'm assuming we'll have some duplicate content issues)? Thanks for the help!!
Technical SEO | | NetStrategies1 -
How bad is it to have duplicate content across http:// and https:// versions of the site?
A lot of pages on our website are currently indexed on both their http:// and https:// URLs. I realise that this is a duplicate content problem, but how major an issue is this in practice? Also, am I right in saying that the best solution would be to use rel canonical tags to highlight the https pages as the canonical versions?
Technical SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Page Juice not moving???
Moved URL's from ldnwicklesscandles.com to ldnwicklesscandles.co.uk because I wanted to rank better for UK where I'm located and thought also the .co.uk for my competitors may have been giving them the advantage. Use Squarespace 7 (transferred over from SS5)----they told me to set primary domain to .co.uk and I've done it. I've also done a 301 redirect and done a change of address in webmaster tools although I'm not sure if all of this is needed? Squarespace seem to think just setting the primary domain is enough. My question is its been a couple of weeks, I've resubmited to Google webmaster to try to speed things up, the new URL is appearing in Google but none of my Page Juice seems to be transferring yet? How long will it take? I know not all the juice will move over but my PA/DA is non existent now and I have no idea if I'm just being impatient or I've done something wrong here. Not a Pro, Just a small biz owner here so forgive me if this has been asked before.
Technical SEO | | ldnwickless0 -
Poor Site Performance
Hello, A couple of months ago, this site was dropped from google due to a noindex, nofollow tag thewealthymind(dot)com It's back up, but performing poorly. Take for example the term "The 4 step belief change" in the home page title tag. This site is the #1 authority on that and yet it ranks 3rd below weaker pages. There's 180 404 errors in GWT, many from past versions of pages of the site but also including thewealthymind(dot)com/index.html and thewealthymind(dot)com/index.htm even though there is a rel=cononical tag on the home page. What's the process of getting this site back to health?
Technical SEO | | BobGW0 -
Why is this site ranking so good?
Site in question: http://bit.ly/aBvVbm Our main competitor in the UK seems to be ranking extremely good for the keyword "jigsaw puzzles" even though their linking profile doesn't seem all that great? They mainly have site-wide links on 2 of their other ecommerce sites which seem to be given them their ranking power as this equals to 100's of links. Does sitewide links on 2 sites really give this much ranking power or am I missing something?
Technical SEO | | Tonyy30 -
What is wrong with my site?
I have been working hard for over two months on my sites in seomoz and have seen some nice results in some (www.etraxc.com/ and www-my-etraxc.com for instance. Still I am really frustrated by www.classroomconnection.us/. I cant even get on the first page with the search term "classroom connection." i would love some help on this one. On a related note, does it help to have links to YouTube videos about the content? If so, how do I ensure that this piece is working well for me? Thanks a ton!
Technical SEO | | bobbabuoy0 -
Replacing a site map
We are in the process of changing our folder/url structure. Currently we have about 5 sitemaps submitted to Google. How is it best to deal with these site maps in terms of either (a) replacing the old URLs with the new ones in the site map and (b) what affect should we have if we removed the site map submission from the Google Webmaster Tools console. Basically we have in the region of 20,000 urls to redirect to the new format, and to update in the site map.
Technical SEO | | NeilTompkins0 -
My site cannot be found by google at all
I don't know why but our company site can not be found by google at all. I have submitted to google webmaster, have social media point to, etc, Is there any reason for this? url for our website is www.bistosamerica.com Thank you
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0