Tech help for hellfire? :)

[hellfire]

Hi tech guys,

Since I know that a lot of you are devs, I wanted to run by something I will implement on a production website.

There is a domain name change for a website with the content being exactly the same.


So, the topic: How to de-index the old site before submitting new site to google in order to avoid duplicate content penalty

Can someone concur that my steps are correct:

1. I put noindex in robot.txt for old site

2. Then I use the sitemap to submit all the urls which are indexed already to the temporary removal tool in search console (url+cache removal).

3. I shift old site to a staging server and programme it to return 401 gone or a 404 to indicate to google after 6 months that nothing exists.

4. Only once, I see the removal requests successful, I submit new site to google with the hope that no duplicate content penalty will be applied.

Can someone kindly confirm that I got it right as new site SEO penalty during covid will cost a lot of $$$ and honestly not good.

Lastly: Anyway to tell google to de-index the whole site at once than manually submitting each indexed url ?

Thanks a lot in advance.

Regards,
Hellfire

[hagis]

google explains this somewhere - I think this is the one https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/site-move-with-url-changes

basically - setup the new content on the new domain, then put in 301 redirects that work for each page on old domain to point to the same page on new domain

what you put is definitely not a good idea,. the old site still needs to exist but put in 301 redirects

edit anyway - check with google - they know what they like

[hellfire]

Hey Hagis,

Thanks a ton for the links. The old brand has zero need to exist. Meaning, the new brand wants to have a Fresh start. The old content (products) are only 55 in total and had only 2k impressions as this was a small pilot + near no social media.

So, the idea is not to transfer old rank to new site but to build new site's own authority from scratch and since it is a highly specific niche, I don't think it will take too much time.

Taking the above into consideration, do you think my steps are ok? My only concern is duplicate content due to improper noindex.

 I will go through the links you sent but I think I might have read them during this weekend

Many thanks

Regards,
Hell

[sup]

I did this many years ago with 301 redirect
I dunno if it's the correct way, but I haven't lost the authority of the old site xD

[JP]

Will you be selling HellFire hoodies?

[hagis]

ah ok,. but I still think what you're suggesting in terms of trying to remove content and make it seem like new content elsewhere is probably not right (really you are moving content - so redirection still seems best plan)

 lets say the content from the old site is a subset of what will be on the new site?

how about this,. (I will make up example)


www.oldsite.com/faq-stuff/faq1
www.oldsite.com/faq-stuff/faq2
www.oldsite.com/faq-stuff/faq3
etc

www.newsite.com/newcontent1
www.newsite.com/newcontent2
etc

have a subdomain on the newsite

faq.newsite.com/faq1
faq.newsite.com/faq2

then 301 redirect the www.oldsite.com/faq-stuff/faq1 to faq.newsite.com/faq1

that way you invent a 3rd place,. so www.newsite.com is seen as new content with a fresh start at google and the faq.newsite.com is related but won't suffer duplicate content (because it's been 301 redirected)

or just a new 3rd site,. so

oldsite.com
newsite.com
namerelatedtonewsite.com


using 301 redirects and keeping those redirects in for as long as possible,. have sites with 301s from old pages and they are still crawled like years after they were redirected

[hagis]

I don't think it's as good as a 301 - but you can (in theory) use a canonical tag to point to the new domain (ick!)

https://powerdigitalmarketing.com/blog/using-relcanonical-tag/

https://www.shopify.co.uk/partners/blog/canonical-urls

[hellfire]

Thanks a ton Hagis for taking your time to help me out The canonical idea was in my head and indeed the new site will have each of the 55 products marked as canonical.

The example you suggested is very interesting indeed The issue is that they are products which cannot be put in subdomain or another related site. But excellent example and surely I will think to implement this in other projects.

Regarding the 301, I am only worried about linking the new site with the old site because the owner did not take care of SEO during 1 year when he abandoned the project (Covid effect). So, he did a lot of crap like putting site in maintenance etc  for long periods, ignored seo fixes suggested by google  etc.

So, I wanted him to start new and not link the fresh domain with old misdeeds lol. Today we submitted a temporary removal for the whole old site. To make it permanent , I can either give a 401 gone or redirect as you suggested.

If I go ahead with my steps, is there any risk from google other than losing entire old site's SEO/page rank etc?

The new site will have 100s of new products in addition to the old 55. I even thought of remixing the product descriptions a bit to give freshness (Will charge for sure lol).

@jp --> good idea to fund my VR occulus . The covid period locked up a ton of my capital in projects which I will now need to revive. So, thankfully I hope to see better days in a few months But man covid kicked the projects in the nuts lol

@sup--301 is the right way as Hagis pointed out Good for you.

Cheers,
Hellfire

[hagis]

ah if it's product pages / shop site and these are shop items,. I don't think I'd concern over duplicate content quite so much

so if it was a load of unique text linked from loads of places for an authority type site / page is different  thing with duplicate content

shop items though,. loads of stuff is sold across multiple sites and duplicated because different stores sell the same item,. in that regard duplicates are probably less of a problem

I would still use 301s,. like you say perhaps the old site hasn't got much rank or whatever but google (my opinion) likes web people who care about broken links etc and care put into redirects shows you umm care

[zeus]

A DIVINE INTERVENTION IS NEEDED

MAY I RECOMMEND HTTP 308 AS PER https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42136829/whats-the-difference-between-http-301-and-308-status-codes/42138726#42138726

[hellfire]

Perfect Hagis Thanks a ton for clearing everything up. Have a nice day ahead

Zeus: Thanks a ton for the tip links. They helped 

and thanks to everyone else who read and responded. Hellfire will cover you when you run with the flag

Cu all in the game

Cheers,

[Absolute_Madness]

the proper way to deal with this is making a redirection ( htaccess)

 Redirect 301 /old path   http://newdomain.com/resource

The redirection instruction must be sorted by the longest to shortest in  the htaccess

It's simply doable in Excel if the path to the ressource changes, otherwise you can use a discard 301:

Redirect 301 / http://newdomain

[hellfire]

Thanks a lot for sharing your knowledge absolute_madness 301 all the way.