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 blogs to different domain
-
Hey guys,
We currently have some blogs on one of our pages (fraserisland.com.au) and we are launching a complete rebranding of our sites. We want to move the blogs from fraserisland.com.au to the new parent page of travelfreedom.com.au (but still link it to fraserisland.com.au), however I don't know what affect this will have on the ranking of the blogs.
The biggest thing I'm worried about is that the domain will be completely different, and not a sub domain, but I'm not sure what impact this will have on the effectiveness of SEO on the blog.
Thanks guys
-
I think this way the Ranking fluctuation will be none to minimum.
-
Thanks Dan! I totally agree with you...
-
Thanks Moosa! Just want to clarify a few points to be sure they don't get mis-understood by other readers:
Duplicate content
- just want to make sure they know, although duplicate content is not the best thing, there is no penalty per se
Cross Domain Canonical
- search engines will in fact crawl both versions. They will just not index the one with the canonical tag pointing to the source page.
-
Hi Lehia
Given that your site has relatively low domain authority right now of 17 and to eliminate user (and your) confusion, I would 301 redirect every individual blog URL to the corresponding new URL on the new domain. It's possible you may lose some ranking - but let me ask:
- how much traffic do you get from the blog right now?
- I bet there's a typical 80/20 pattern where maybe a small handful of blog URLs are getting more of the traffic?
Point being, I would really do what's best in the long-term and to consolidate your brands/domains. I've performed and seen many migrations perfectly fine.
One last thing!
- Crawl your old site or somehow gather up the old URLs from the old domain
- Throw them in Screaming Frog in List mode
- Export the "Redirect Chain" report
- And undo any redirect chains
I talk about that a little here.
Also, make sure you continue to allow Google to crawl the old domain (don't block it with robots.txt).
-
Thanks Moosa! That helps heap. I think the best practice is to just keep the blogs on their current URL, and then put in a 301 from the new parent domain to the existing blogs. That way people can find the blogs through the parent domain and be direct to the existing Urls. Would you agree?
-
Thanks Josh!
-
You said but still link it to fraserisland.co.au. From this you mean a same blog post can be access from this and the new URL?
- Two different URL containing the same content will be considered as duplicate content, which is defiantly not a good idea when it comes to rankings!
- If you 301 (let’s say you do it right) the URL from old domain to new domain. This will eliminate the duplicate content issue but redirection does lose some amount of link juice so your rankings will see a dip for few days and weeks if not permanent.
- If you set cross domain canonical, this will allow the user to see the same blog post on two different URLs but search engine will only crawl the preferred version so it will be two pages for user but search engine will only consider the preferred version. Not really a good idea in my opinion as I hope most of your blog traffic is coming from search engines anyways…
I think whatever step you will take the rankings are going to change (temporary or permanent) so you have to keep your strategy designed accordingly.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Backlinks from ads on parked domains? Is this possible?
Hello Moz Friends, So as I was researching some competitive backlinks and I noticed a lot of backlinks that a clients competitor has are on parked domains and they appear to be google ads from some point. You know the pages that this page no longer exists, or hey do you want to buy this domain? and it has like 6 google ads on it? Yep those pages. My clients industry is construction and their competitor has links from zombie websites, foreign, websites and more. But the links are no longer on the page. Like when it was crawled, their ad was showing. Does this make any sense and is it usually temporary? Thank you for your thoughts friends!
Link Building | | asbchris0 -
Backlinks from the Same Domain (But Different Pages)
Wayyy back when (in the days of yore) Mr Cutts spelled out in a video that page rank is distributed equally between the external links on the page. If there are two links on a page, each gets passed 50% of the available page rank etc. (Perhaps an oversimplification but bear with me). As a result of this, the company I worked for at the time (this was the dark ages when sidebar homepage links were in vogue) decreed that we would only ever approach a site about a link for a client once, as additional links had little extra SEO Value. Now you could argue that if there are 5 external links, each acquiring 20% of the power, and your site has 2 of those, you are getting 40% of the power, but lets forget the basic math for a minute. I have scoured the web and Mr Cutts' videos and I cannot find the answer to my question: If my site (Site A) has a backlink from SiteB Page 1, and a backlink from SiteB page 2 - does this count as two separate links in the eyes of Google? If the SAME site links out to my site, linking to different pages in different posts, does this give me more SEO benefit? Thanks for your time!
Link Building | | Turkey0 -
Are Blog Comments now useless?
Hello I see there is much debate on this issue of Blog Commenting. Is it still a useful way to get a backlink? Would you suggest only using 'No follow' blogs to leave comments? Many thanks
Link Building | | missy290 -
Should I link from my blog back to my product pages?
Hello... I just installed a blog on my Magento site. My question is whether or not i should be linking within posts on the blog back to the product or category pages that i am talking about...from an SEO perspective. If in my post i am talking about flashlights being important when preparing for a storm, should i link the word flashlights to the flashlight category on my site? I know I can do this, the question is should i, from google's perspective. A) should i link the word (flashlights) to that category on my page B) should i put a line at the bottom of every post that says something like "if you are interested in purchasing flashlights, visit this link" and hyperlink that whole sentence... THANKS!
Link Building | | Prime850 -
Separate blog url helpful?
I am managing a website for a hotel brokerage firm. The main URL is www.hotelassetsgroup.com but we started a new blog with the URL www.hotelsforsaleblog.com. We chose the blog URL because it has the words "hotels for sale." The main website has a tab at the top titled "Blog" which links to the blog URL. I am not sure if this is helping us or not because the main URL and blog URL are both competing for the name of the business "Hotel Assets Group." The blog has very little interlinking within the same URL because it mainly links to the main website. Should we combine the two URLs together and just have the blog URL be the same like- hotelassetsgroup.com/blog or something like that?
Link Building | | lwilkins0 -
It is ok to link together multiple domains on the same ip?
I have multiple domains (more than 50) in the same niche. All domains are on the same ip. It is ok to link them together, or to create a piramid link between them?
Link Building | | maldiniii0 -
Building Links to Exact Match Domains
What are the pros and cons having exact match domain and how can you create a brand name and build backlinks? Say we have a domain personalizedbirthdaygifts.com We are quite stuck with what anchor text we need to use and how do we vary it? I've heard that we have to stay away from using commercial keywords as anchor text heavily. We have to also use our brand name. And here we get stuck as we don't have a brand name. In this case Our brand name should be personalized birthday gifts but this is also commercial keyword. I have seen before similar websites droped from ranking because they have commercial keywords in their domain and most of their backlink anchor texts are commercial. If I had a website called twentyfive.com selling birthday gifts it would be a lot easier. But when you have a website personalizedbirthdaygifts.com and trying to rank for personalized birthday gifts and birthday gifts it's tough. OR isn't it? I hope I explained it well and didn't confuse anybody... Thanks
Link Building | | Jvalops0