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.
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.
-
You can do that. No problem. It will be best for wholesale customers.
My comments are designed to be best for retail rankings. If my connections to wholesale customers are poor then I would use your method. If my connections to wholesale customers are strong them I would do what's best for retail rankings. It is simply a matter of choice.
-
Your points about communicating as much as possible offline and by email, etc, are well taken.
I would still like to redirect existing wholesale pages to newwholesaledomain.com, primarily due to a desire to make everything as easy as we can for both types of customers. They want to emphasize the retail side but don't want to make it a pain for wholesale customers in the process.
So I'm inclined to redirect retail pages to newretaildomain.com and wholesale pages to newwholesaledomain.com. All page by page of course. Since the currentdomain.com home page will redirect to newretaildomain.com, we would put a notice on the new home page for our wholesale customers, pointing them to newwholesaledomain.com.
How does that sound? I think you are all correct that I should avoid redirect chains and meta refreshes.
-
I might also send out some... "Tell a Friend" email messages to past clients. They can then forward these to friends who may or may not have purchased in the past, but it will get them nice savings on their first purchase from your new domain.
I would make these offers so good that I don't make much money on them. This is just to get new people to the new domain. I would send them out in batches so my employees filling orders will not be so swamped that they will have trouble giving their normal fast service.
-
It would also be a good idea to plan and announce the move. This can be done by:
-
email and mail to important retail and wholesale clients.
-
before redirecting pages the old domain could include obvious messages to retail and wholesale clients, thanking them for their support, letting them know about the schedule of the move, and asking them to bookmark the new site.
-
inserts in retail shipments
-
special advertising before the move
-
special advertising and email after the move that gives old customers a nice discount when they make their first purchase on the new website.
-
-
Personally. I would not use metarefresh. I don't know how Google will treat it.
If I wanted to keep as much power as possible on the retail site I would have a plain page with my full internal navigation on it. It would also have a very clear message for wholesale visitors, that gives them as much time as they need to read, change their directories, and leave by their own action.
-
Interesting. At first I thought that it isn't a great experience for wholesale customers, but what if we added a meta refresh so that page has a message like... "The content you are looking for has moved. You will be redirected to the new location automatically in 5 seconds. Please bookmark the correct page at newwholesaledomain.com"
-
My first thought was exactly what EGOL suggested. However given the decission that they are dead set on rebranding I would suggest the following.
Split the wholesale site off first, leaving the current domain in place for a transitional period. After a pre-dertmined period of time (however long they feel it necessary for wholesale buyers to get used to the new website), then change the retail side to the new brand, and take full advatange of 301 and change of address.
My thoughts hope it helps,
Don
-
OK... thanks for the details.
In that case. I would build newretaildomain.com. Any pages that have equivalent or near-equivalent content on currentdomain.com would 301 direct page-by-page to newretaildomain.com.
All existing wholesale pages on currentdomain.com would 301 redirect to a new page on newretaildomain.com that explains your new wholesale website and has one outlink to newwholesaledomain.com. This page will keep all of the power of the wholesale pages on your new retail site, which must be competitive in the SERPs.
This maximizes power of newretaildomain.com and directs anyone who follows links to old pages on currentdomain.com to your new wholesale website.
This would be accompanied by multiple email and snail mail announcements to all wholesale clients. Sales agents would be trained how to transition.
-
I like this idea too
-
Thanks EGOL. Unfortunately they are committed to a full rebranding and want a new domain.
-
This is a great question and not easy. I would love to hear some others chime in. My guess is that splitting the pages immediately would be the best. Yes, you would lose the ability to do the change of address, but that really isn't essential. At the beginning, I would keep the content as similar as possible if not identical after the transfer (of course with different internal links).
-
If this was my biz and currentdomain.com is an appropriate domain for selling retail then I would start a brand new wholesale website and give it one link from the "about us" page on currentdomain.com. Any wholesale pages on current domain would redirect internally to the "about us" page. This keeps all of the power of currentdomain.com intact and does not divide it up.
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
-
Does redirecting from a "bad" domain "infect" the new domain?
Hi all, So a complicated question that requires a little background. I bought unseenjapan.com to serve as a legitimate news site about a year ago. Social media and content growth has been good. Unfortunately, one thing I didn't realize when I bought this domain was that it used to be a porn site. I've managed to muck out some of the damage already - primarily, I got major vendors like Macafee and OpenDNS to remove the "porn" categorization, which has unblocked the site at most schools & locations w/ public wifi. The sticky bit, however, is Google. Google has the domain filtered under SafeSearch, which means we're losing - and will continue to lose - a ton of organic traffic. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this, and appeal the decision. Unfortunately, Google's Reconsideration Request form currently doesn't work unless your site has an existing manual action against it (mine does not). I've also heard such requests, even if I did figure out how to make them, often just get ignored for months on end. Now, I have a back up plan. I've registered unseen-japan.com, and I could just move my domain over to the new domain if I can't get this issue resolved. It would allow me to be on a domain with a clean history while not having to change my brand. But if I do that, and I set up 301 redirects from the former domain, will it simply cause the new domain to be perceived as an "adult" domain by Google? I.e., will the former URL's bad reputation carry over to the new one? I haven't made a decision one way or the other yet, so any insights are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaiaslastlaugh0 -
I'm a newb, built a website with Wix want to redirect it to a domain I own, but am reading that Wix is bad for this
Hi, I am building this site for my boss http://charlesfridmanpr.wix.com/real-estate and am still working on it. I'm getting close to the stage where I want to redirect it to the URL we want to use, but in reading these forums, it says that because all of subpages (?) have a # in them, they will not be read or indexed by google. I am very new to this, and while it may not look like it, the website has taken me quite a while to design. Is there a way to fix this? We want to appear high up for a non competitive keyword. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charlesfridmanpr0 -
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 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
Outranking a crappy outdated site with domain age & keywords in URL.
I'm trying to outrank a website with the following: Website with #1 ranking for a search query with "City & Brand" Domain Authority - 2 Domain Age - 11 years & 9 months old Has both the City & brand in the URL name. The site is crap, outdated.. probably last designed in the 90's, old layouts, not a lot of content & NO keywords in the titles & descriptions on all pages. My site ranks 5th for the same keyword.. BEHIND 4 pages from the site described above. Domain Authority - 2 Domain Age - 4 years & 2 months old Has only the CITY in the URL. Brand new site design this past year, new content & individual keywords in the titles, descriptions on each page. My main question is.... do you think it would be be beneficial to buy a new domain name with the BRAND in the URL & CITY & 301 redirect my 4 year old domain to the new domain to pass along the authority it has gained. Will having the brand in the URL make much of a difference? Do you think that small step would even help to beat the crappy but old site out? Thanks for any help & suggestions on how to beat this old site or at least show up second.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Splitting one Website into 2 Different New Websites with 301 redirects, help?
Here's the deal. My website stbands.com does fairly well. The only issue it is facing a long term branding crisis. It sells custom products and sporting goods. We decided that we want to make a sporting goods website for the retail stuff and then a custom site only focusing on the custom stuff. One website transformed and broken into 2 new ones, with two new brand names. The way we are thinking about doing this is doing a lot of 301 redirects, but what do we do with the homepage (stbands.com) and what is the best practice to make sure we don't lose traffic to the categories, etc.? Which new website do we 301 the homepage to? It's rough because for some keywords we rank 3 or 4 times on the first page. Scary times, but something must be done for the long term. Any advise is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance. We are set for a busy next few months 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hyrule0 -
Buying an existing domain with higher ranks for redirecting
I've recently came across one of my competitors who's looking to sell their domain. Now they currently rank higher than my primary site for a few keywords we are targeting. Would it be wise to buy the domain and do a name server change over to my primary domain? Would it even help boost ranks for the keywords they rank higher for? Or will the link juice be minimal? Any thoughts would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | upick-1623910 -
Move blog from subdomain to main domain on ecom site?
I am wondering what my fellow mozers think. Pretty set about my direction but want to get any other input to aid in my decision. Have an ecom site with a www.blog.maindomain.com. The blog is fairly new and no major rankings. There are only about 30 posts. This isn't a super competitive market and the blogging won't be a huge part of our content strategy but I would like to use it for passing juice etc. Would you go through the trouble to move the blog to www.site.com/blog and redirecting all the old content to new?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises0