Migrating domains from a domain that will have new content.
-
We have a new url. The old url is being taken over by someone else. Is it possible to still have a successful redirect/migration strategy if we are redirect from our old domain, which is now being used by someone else. I see a big mess, but I'm being told we can redirect all the links to our old content (which is now used by someone else) to our new url. Thoughts? craziness? insanity? Or I'm just not getting it:)
-
Thank You!
-
Hi,
Yes this will work if you’re on a new domain, a subdomain, or even just in a folder on the existing domain.
As long as the URLs you were using aren’t being used for the parent companies' content you can redirect them all back to your subdomain with the method above.
Hope that helps,
Tom
-
Thank you very much! This was very helpful. So this will work if our parent company is taking over our existing url and putting new content on it and moving us to a subdomain?
-
Hi there,
You’d redirect just the same as redirecting an entire site, except only create rules for the pages you used to own. Mirror your old content on your new site (if you can use the same URIs that would make things easier) and then write a series of rules to redirect only your content.
If your URIs are staying the same you could do something like:
RedirectCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/your-old-content/$ [NC,OR]
RedirectCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/folder/your other content$ [NC,OR]
RedirectCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/mynews/.* [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]You could use regex to match lots of your URLs at once, but you’d need to be careful not to redirect the new owners pages too. When I redirect an entire site I always create a final rule which says anything else? Send it to the homepage like this:
RedirectRule .* http://www.newsite.com/ [R=301,L]
But this time you would leave that off, as any requests not caught by your rewrite condition will belong to the new owner and go to where they’re intended on the old site.
Hope that helps explain things,
Tom
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
-
Will canonical solve this?
Hi all, I look after a website which sells a range of products. Each of these products has different applications, so each product has a different product page. For eg. Product one for x application Product one for y application Product one for z application Each variation page has its own URL as if it is a page of its own. The text on each of the pages is slightly different depending on the application, but generally very similar. If I were to have a generic page for product one, and add canonical tags to all the variation pages pointing to this generic page, would that solve the duplicate content issue? Thanks in advance, Ethan
Technical SEO | | Analoxltd0 -
Why Are Some Pages On A New Domain Not Being Indexed?
Background: A company I am working with recently consolidated content from several existing domains into one new domain. Each of the old domains focused on a vertical and each had a number of product pages and a number of blog pages; these are now in directories on the new domain. For example, what was www.verticaldomainone.com/products/productname is now www.newdomain.com/verticalone/products/product name and the blog posts have moved from www.verticaldomaintwo.com/blog/blogpost to www.newdomain.com/verticaltwo/blog/blogpost. Many of those pages used to rank in the SERPs but they now do not. Investigation so far: Looking at Search Console's crawl stats most of the product pages and blog posts do not appear to be being indexed. This is confirmed by using the site: search modifier, which only returns a couple of products and a couple of blog posts in each vertical. Those pages are not the same as the pages with backlinks pointing directly at them. I've investigated the obvious points without success so far: There are a couple of issues with 301s that I am working with them to rectify but I have checked all pages on the old site and most redirects are in place and working There is currently no HTML or XML sitemap for the new site (this will be put in place soon) but I don't think this is an issue since a few products are being indexed and appearing in SERPs Search Console is returning no crawl errors, manual penalties, or anything else adverse Every product page is linked to from the /course page for the relevant vertical through a followed link. None of the pages have a noindex tag on them and the robots.txt allows all crawlers to access all pages One thing to note is that the site is build using react.js, so all content is within app.js. However this does not appear to affect pages higher up the navigation trees like the /vertical/products pages or the home page. So the question is: "Why might product and blog pages not be indexed on the new domain when they were previously and what can I do about it?"
Technical SEO | | BenjaminMorel0 -
Old domain still being crawled despite 301s to new domain
Hi there, We switched from the domain X.com to Y.com in late 2013 and for the most part, the transition was successful. We were able to 301 most of our content over without too much trouble. But when when I do a site:X.com in Google, I still see about 6240 URLs of X listed. But if you click on a link, you get 301d to Y. Maybe Google has not re-crawled those X pages to know of the 301 to Y, right? The home page of X.com is shown in the site:X.com results. But if I look at the cached version, the cached description will say :This is Google's cache of Y.com. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on July 31, 2014." So, Google has freshly crawled the page. It does know of the 301 to Y and is showing that page's content. But the X.com home page still shows up on site:X.com. How is the domain for X showing rather than Y when even Google's cache is showing the page content and URL for Y? There are some other similar examples. For instance, you would see a deep URL for X, but just looking at the <title>in the SERP, you can see it has crawled the Y equivalent. Clicking on the link gives you a 301 to the Y equivalent. The cached version of the deep URL to X also shows the content of Y.</p> <p>Any suggestions on how to fix this or if it's a problem. I'm concerned that some SEO equity is still being sequestered in the old domain.</p> <p>Thanks,</p> <p>Stephen</p></title>
Technical SEO | | fernandoRiveraZ1 -
Setting up addon domains properly (bonus duplicate content issue inside)
A new client of mine is using 1and1 hosting from back in the dark ages. Turns out, her primary domain and her main website (different domain) are exactly the same. She likes to have the domains names of her books, but her intention is to have it redirect to her main site. Unfortunately, 1and1's control panel is light years behind cpanel, so when she set up her new domains it just pointed everything to the same directory. I just want to make sure I don't make this up, so please correct me if I'm wrong about something. I'm assuming this is a major duplicate content deal, so I plan to create a new directory for each add-on domain. Since her main site is an add-on itself, I'll have to move all the files into it's new home directory. Then I'll create an htaccess file for each domain and redirect it to her main site. Right so far? My major concern is with the duplicate content. She's had two sites being exactly the same for years. Will there be any issues leftover after I set everything up properly? Is there anything else I need to do? Thanks for the help guys! I'm fairly new to this community and love the opportunity to learn from the best!
Technical SEO | | Mattymar0 -
Will one line of duplicate content drag down my landing page?
I am using copyscape to check for duplicate content on my landing pages. I found three sites that have the exact same sentence as mine, on a page that I rank well for on one of two key terms related to the product. The sentence is not essential to my product page. Do I risk losing page one rank on a key search term when I remove that sentence on my site, in hopes of possibly improving the page on the second key search term? Do I leave it alone? This is an older "template" site with very little that I can do SEO-wise, and I have managed to get a few key prodcut landing pages on page one of Google. It has seen a drop in rank on many landing pages post-panda, and I'm doing my best to clean up what I can. Do I leave well enough alone for a page one rank on one term, or swap out that sentence in hopes of getting better rank on two keywords?
Technical SEO | | Ticket_King0 -
One landing page with lots of content or content hub?
Interested in getting some opinions on if it's better to build one great landing page with tons of content or build a good landing page and build more content (as blog posts?) and interlink them back to the landing/hub page? Thoughts and opinions? Chris
Technical SEO | | sanctuarymg0 -
Sub Domains
Hi,,, Okay we have 1 main site , a few years back we went down the road of sub domains and generated about 10. They have page rank and age but we wish to move them back to the main web site. What is the correct or best way to achieve this. 1 copy all content to the main web site creating dup pages and then use a redirects from the sub pages to the new dup pages on the main domain... or 2 write new content on the main domain for the subdomain pages and redirect to the new content. Problem with 2 is the amount of work involved...
Technical SEO | | NotThatFast0 -
Why Google did not index our domain?
Hi, We launched tmart 60 days ago and submitted to google, bing, yahoo 20 days later. But google had never indexed our website still when yahoo indexed it in one week. What we have checked or tried: 1. We got 20~50 inlinks in one month and now 81 inlinks via yahoo site explorer. 2. This domain has registered for 13 years and we purchased it from sedo last year. We
Technical SEO | | zt673
did not find any problems from domain archive pages. 3. Page similar: the homepage is 50% similar to one of our competitors when we just launched.
So we adjusted the page structure and modified the content one month later and decreased the similarity to 30% (by tools from webconfs.com) 4. Google Robots: googlebot crawled our website every day after we submitted for indexing.
We opened GWT account for it and added the xml sitemap last week. GWT said nothing
was wrong except the time of page loading. Our questions: Why google did not indexed our website? What should we do? Thanks, wu0