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.
Move to new domain using Canonical Tag
-
At the moment, I am moving from olddomain.com (niche site) to the newdomain.com (multi-niche site).
Due to some reasons, I do not want to use 301 right now and planning to use the canonical pointing to the new domain instead.
Would Google rank the new site instead of the old site? From what I have learnt, the canonical tag lets Google know that which is the main source of the contents.
Thank you very much!
-
This is exactly right and is a great answer. Canonical tags stop content duplication from being a problem and can alleviate content duplication related devaluations (or in extreme cases, penalties)
What canonical tags don't do anywhere near so well (if at all) is transfer SEO authority from one page to another. If OP did what they were suggesting, the risks would be (1) Google interprets the canonical tags wrong (2) Google starts ranking pages on the new site instead of the old pages, but (critically) without any appended backlink equity (3) all rankings are then lost on both sites
I'd be extremely, extremely hesitant to deploy in the OPs specified manner and I think that Nigel is 110% correct here
-
Hi India
It is unusual to keep both domains if you really want to move site but yes, you can do cross-site canonicals.
So place ON EVERY page of the old site a canonical to the corresponding page on the new site.
The old site will disappear from SERPS and the new site will appear.
Warning
The problem you will have is that the new site will not inherit any of the backlink equity you have built up on the old site. For that, you will need to do a page by page 301 redirect in htaccess on the old site.
I hope that helps
Regards Nigel
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 using a reverse proxy give me the benefits of the main sites domain authority?
If I am running example.com and have a blog on exampleblog.com Will moving the blog to example.com/blog and using a reverse proxy give the blog the same domain authority as example.com Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | El-Bracko0 -
Moving half my website to a new website: 301?
Good Morning! We currently have two websites which are driving all of our traffic. Our end goal is to combine the two and fold them into each other. Can I redirect the duplicate content from one domain to our main domain even though the URL's are different. Ill give an example below. (The domains are not the real domains). The CEO does not want to remove the other website entirely yet, but is willing to begin some sort of consolidation process. ABCaddiction.com is the main domain which covers everything from drug addiction to dual diagnosis treatment. ABCdualdiagnosis.com is our secondary website which covers everything as well. Can I redirect the entire drug addiction half of the website to ABCaddiction.com? With the eventual goal of moving everything together.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
<aside>Tag Use</aside>
Hi Guys, Just after some clarification - I have recently been told that by placing content in <aside></aside> tags spiders will ignore the content. Is this the case? I always thought that content placed in these tags was to identify related content. To put the query into some context, we have the same content on multiple pages on a site, which is relevant to the main body copy - but could throw up duplicate content issues... Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOBirmingham811 -
Best Practices for Moving a Sub-Domain to a Sub-Folder
One of my clients is moving their subdomain to a subfolder on their main domain. (ie. blog.example.com to example.com/blog) I just wanted to get everyone's thoughts on some best practices for things we should be doing/looking for when making this move.? ie WMT, .htaccess, 301s etc? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarinPirkey0 -
Lowercase VS. Uppercase Canonical tags?
Hi MOZ, I was hoping that someone could help shed some light on an issue I'm having with URL structure and the canonical tag. The company I work for is a distributor of electrical products and our E-commerce site is structured so that our URL's (specifically, our product detail page URL's) include a portion (the part #) that is all uppercase (e.g: buy/OEL-Worldwide-Industries/AFW-PG-10-10). The issue is that we have just recently included a canonical tag in all of our product detail pages and the programmer that worked on this project has every canonical tag in lowercase instead of uppercase. Now, in GWT, I'm seeing over 20,000-25,000 "duplicate title tags" or "duplicate descriptions". Is this an issue? Could this issue be resolved by simply changing the canonical tag to reflect the uppercase URL's? I'm not too well versed in canonical tags and would love a little insight. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GalcoIndustrial0 -
Canonical link vs root domain
I have a wordpress website installed on http://domain.com/home/ instead of http://domain.com - Does it matter whether I leave it that way with a canonical link from the domain.com to the domain.com/home/ or should I move the wordpress files and database to the root domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JosephFrost0 -
Is it ok to use both 301 redirect and rel="canonical' at the same time?
Hi everyone, I'm sorry if this has been asked before. I just wasn't able to find a response in previous questions. To fix the problems in our website regarding duplication I have the possibility to set up 301's and, at the same time, modify our CMS so that it automatically sets a rel="canonical" tag for every page that is generated. Would it be a problem to have both methods set up? Is it a problem to have a on a page that is redirecting to another one? Is it advisable to have a rel="canonical" tag on every single page? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SDLOnlineChannel0 -
Best approach to launch a new site with new urls - same domain
www.sierratradingpost.com We have a high volume e-commerce website with over 15K items, an average of 150K visits per day and 12.6 pages per visit. We are launching a new website this spring which is currently on a beta sub domain and we are looking for the best strategy that preserves our current search rankings while throttling traffic (possibly 25% per week) to measure results. The new site will be soft launched as we plan to slowly migrate traffic to it via a load balancer. This way we can monitor performance of the new site while still having the old site as a backup. Only when we are fully comfortable with the new site will we submit the 301 redirects and migrate everyone over to the new site. We will have a month or so of running both sites. Except for the homepage the URL structure for the new site is different than the old site. What is our best strategy so we don’t lose ranking on the old site and start earning ranking on the new site, while avoiding duplicate content and cloaking issues? Here is what we got back from a Google post which may highlight our concerns better: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=62d0a16c4702a17d&hl=en&fid=62d0a16c4702a17d00049b67b51500a6 Thank You, sincerely, Stephan Woo Cude SEO Specialist [email protected]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | STPseo0