Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Moving Content To Another Website With No Redirect?
-
I've got a website that has lots of valuable content and tools but it's been hit too hard by both Panda and Penguin. I came to the conclusion that I'd be better off with a new website as this one is going to hell no matter how much time and money I put in it. Had I started a new website the first time it got hit by Penguin, I'd be profitable today.
I'd like to move some of that content to this other domain but I don't want to do 301 redirects as I don't want to pass bad link juice. I know I'll lose all links and visitors to the original website but I don't care.
My only concern is duplicate content. I was thinking of setting the pages to noindex on the original website and wait until they don't appear in Google's index. Then I'd move them over to the new domain to be indexed again.
Do you see any problem with this? Should I rewrite everything instead? I hate spinning content...!
-
If we're understanding the situation correctly, I'd say this sums it up pretty well.
-
It sounds to me as though most of the content from old site is staying but that 3 enigmatic 'tools' are being moved to a new domain.
In which case I would want to be sure that the functionality being moved wasn't the cause of the previously lifted penalty, especially from a Panda perspective (given that the tools on the new domain presumably won't have any links pointing to it, Penguin shouldn't be an issue) - as a penalty would be re-applied if the tools are not Panda-friendly.
So:
- if you want to have the tools on both sites, I'm with Pete - noindex the tools on the old site.
- if you are permanently moving the tools, review them for Panda-friendliness and then noindex the old site's URLs, probably worth blocking the old URL in robots.txt as well.
- If your previous penalty was nothing to do with the tools at all, and the link profile of those pages is good (or if there aren't any links) then 301 the old URLs to the new.
That's if between Pete and myself we've understood correctly what you're trying to achieve.
Good Luck!
-
So, I'm confused - are you looking to keep both sites active? If you're just moving the tools to a new domain, you could NOINDEX the old pages. If the link-based penalty isn't too severe, you might try a cross-domain rel=canonical on the old site. Unfortunately, without understanding the penalty profile, it's a bit tricky to advise. It's really a cost/benefit trade-off - how much risk of carrying the penalty are you willing to accept vs. the alternative of cutting off all authority and starting over on the new site.
If you've had Panda-related problems, though, I wouldn't keep the tools crawlable on both sites. That seems more likely to prolong your problems than it is to solve them.
-
In fact, I am not moving any content from the old website to the new one. It's just 3 online tools that I wanted to keep for the new website. They both have different content though but the functionalities are the same. I've "noindex" the tools on the old website.
By the way, the manual penalty has been revoked on the old website a few weeks ago.
-
I tend to agree with Martin - it seems like there's probably a way to preserve some of the power of the old site and 301-redirect selectively (or potentially use cross-domain rel=canonical tags), but it would take a much deeper understanding of the site than Q&A allows.
If you rebuild the site from scratch, you'd almost always want to de-index the old site. I'd flat out remove it via Google Webmaster Tools - it's the fastest method. Leaving both sites crawlable is only going to compound your problems and haunt the new site.
I'd warn, though, that if this is Panda-related, just moving the content won't solve your problems. You do have to sort out why they happened in the first place, or the same algorithmic issues will just come back. In other words, if the problems are content-related, then it doesn't really matter where the content lives. If the problems are link related, then moving will remove the problems. Of course, moving will also remove and advantages you currently have based on good links.
Unfortunately, this isn't a problem that can be addressed without a pretty deep audit. My gut feeling is that there may be a way to preserve some of the authority of the old site, but you really need to pin down the problems. Panda + Penguin is a wide swath of potential problems and just isn't enough information to do this right.
-
Some of this "content" are in fact online tools and the tutorials that accompanies it.
-
Hi Stephane,
All the below assumes you feel there is some value in keeping the original website live at all.
My first reaction would be to do a full review of all your old content and carefully consider which ones may have been hit by Panda - is there keyword stuffing, content duplicated from other sites, thin content...etc? Then either fix or completely rewrite those.
After that you should avoid publishing duplicated content so my view would be
1. Remove the rewritten/fixed articles completely from the old site
2. Don't implement the 301 so you don't get any redirected bad Penguin vibe
3. Put a block on those URLs using robots.txt
4. Remove the URLs from Google's index in Webmaster ToolsThen you are free to publish your new, Panda-friendly content to your new website.
Not sure what other mozzers would say, but that's my view. This is not about 'spinning content' but removing poor content and republishing great content. Hope it makes sense.
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
-
If my website uses CDN does thousands of 301 redirect can harm the website performance?
Hi, If my website uses CDN does thousands of 301 redirect can harm the website performance? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
Splitting and moving site to two domains - How to redirect
I have a client who is going to split their retail and wholesale business and rebrand the retail biz. So let’s say they are going to move everything from currentdomain.com to either retaildomain.com or wholesaledomain.com. The most important business for them is the retail site, so they want to pass on as much ranking power as they can from currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com. I see two choices here: We can 301 redirect all of currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com, and then redirect any wholesale pages to wholesaledomain.com. The advantage is that we can use GSC’s change of address tool to report the change to Google. The downside is that there is a redirect chain (2 hops) to wholesaledomain.com. Would this confuse Google? Or we can 301 redirect page by page from currentdomain.com to the appropriate page on either new site. This means no redirect chains but it also means that we can’t use GSC’s change of address tool. Which would you do and why? And is there another option that I'm missing? I appreciate any insights you can share.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rich.owings1 -
Website Redesign, 301 Redirects, and Link Juice
I want to change my client’s ecommerce site to Shopify. The only problem is that Shopify doesn’t let you customize domains. I plan to: keep each page’s content exactly the same keep the same domain name 301 redirect all of the pages to their new url The ONLY thing that will change is each page’s url. Again, each page will have the exact same content. The only source of traffic to this site is via Google organic search and sales depend on the traffic. There are about 10 pages that have excellent link juice, 20 pages that have medium link juice, and the rest is small link juice. Many of our links that have significant link juice are on message boards written by people that like our product. I plan to change these urls and 301 redirect them to their new urls. I’ve read tons of pages online about this topic. Some people that say it won’t effect link juice at all, some say it will might effect link juice temporarily, and others are uncertain. Most answers tend to be “You should be good. You might lose some traffic temporarily. You might want to switch some of your urls to the new structure to see how it affects it first.” Here’s my question: 1) Has anyone ever done changed a url structure for an existing website with link juice? What were your results and do you have a definitive answer on the topic? 2) How much link juice (if any) will be lost if I keep all of the exact content the same but only change each page’s url? 3) If link juice is temporarily lost and then regained, how long will it be temporarily lost? 1 week? 1 month? 6 months? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirbyf0 -
Question about moving content from one site to another without a 301
I could use a second opinion about moving content from some inactive sites to my main site. Once upon a time, we had a handful of geotargeted websites set up targeting various cities that we serve. This was in addition to our main site, which was mostly targeted to our primary office and ranked great for those keywords. Our main site has plenty of authority, has been around for ages, etc. We built out these geo-targeted sites with some good landing pages and kept them active with regularly scheduled blog posts which were unique and either interesting or helpful. Although we had a little success with these, we eventually saw the light and realized that our main site was strong enough to rank for these cities as well, which made life a whole lot easier, not to mention a lot less spammy. We've got some good content on these other sites that I'd like to use on our main site, especially the blog posts. Now that I've got it through my head that there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, I understand that I could just start moving this content over so long as I put a 301 redirect in place where the content used to be on these old sites. Which leads me to my question. Our SEO was careful not to have these other websites pointing to our main site to avoid looking like we were trying to do something shady from a link building perspective. His concern is that these redirects would undermine that effort and having a bunch of redirects from a half dozen sites could end up hurting us somehow. Do you think that is the case? What he is suggesting we do is remove all of the content that we'd like to use and use Webmaster Tools to request that this content be removed from the index. Then, after the sites have been recrawled, we'll check for ourselves to confirm they've been removed and proceed with using the content however we'd like. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeeAbrahamson0 -
How do you 301 redirect URLs with a hashbang (#!) format? We just lost a ton of pagerank because we thought javascript redirect was the only way! But other sites have been able to do this – examples and details inside
Hi Moz, Here's more info on our problem, and thanks for reading! We’re trying to Create 301 redirects for 44 pages on site.com. We’re having trouble 301 redirecting these pages, possibly because they are AJAX and have hashbangs in the URLs. These are locations pages. The old locations URLs are in the following format: www.site.com/locations/#!new-york and the new URLs that we want to redirect to are in this format: www.site.com/locations/new-york We have not been able to create these redirects using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v.1.5.3.2. The CMS is WordPress version 3.9.1 The reason we want to 301 redirect these pages is because we have created new pages to replace them, and we want to pass pagerank from the old pages to the new. A 301 redirect is the ideal way to pass pagerank. Examples of pages that are able to 301 redirect hashbang URLs include http://www.sherrilltree.com/Saddles#!Saddles and https://twitter.com/#!RobOusbey.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
301 Redirect of subdomain?
Fellow Mozzers, I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around a redirect issue and thought it was worth posing the question to the Moz community. I did a search first but couldn't find the exact answer I was looking for. How does a 301 redirect work when you redirect a sub domain example.homepage.com to www.homepage.com but you keep the sub directories of example.homepage.com/page-1 active and are trying to rank them? I'm dealing with a current project where this is happening and this doesn't make sense to me, to redirect the subdomain if you're also trying to rank/create search traffic for pages, sub directories on example.homepage.com. This also get's into the debate of if a sub domain site is viewed as it's own website and therefore has to rank itself. If this is true, it seems like we're kind of killing the authority of the site by redirecting it. Additionally, www.homepage.com has a much stronger link profile than example.homepage.com I hope this makes sense. Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMG-Texas0 -
303 redirect
Hi, 303 redirect is a good thing or not ? I have a homepage in 2 languages FR and EN > mywebsite.com/fr/ and mywebsite.com/en/. A 303 redirect is on mywebsite.com to mywebsite.com/fr/. Thanks D.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | android_lyon0 -
Redirecting one site to another for link juice
I have two sites with same theme - buying cars. I am going remove one of the sites from being crawled permenantly (ie junkthecars.com) and point domian via 301, to another similar theme site (sellthecars.com). The purpose is to simply pass the SEO link juice from one site to the other as we retire junkthecars.com.... Is a forwarding of the domain OK and the best way for the search engines to increase the rank of sellthecars.com (we hate to wast the link work done on Junkthecars.com)? What dangers should I look for that could hurt sellthecars.com if we do the redirect at a simple TLD?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bestone0