To canonicalize an old site to a VERY young one

[Greywolf]

Hi,
The situation is I have an old e-commerce site with good Pagreank (13 yrs old) and a new 3 month old site. Currently with duplicate content because it's e-commerce site. The old site has two languages on each product page, the new site only English. Traffic to old site is half English, half the traffic is the other language.
Question is should I canonicalise to the new 3 month old domain that's only got English content at the moment? Soon it will also have both languages, but proper multi-lingual. The old site is meant to be for wholesalers, the new site for end-users. So the new site should get all the SE traffic it can get, I amnot worried about the old site not getting much because it has established userbase. If I canonicalise now, will I lose all the non English traffic to the old site? And is it a good idea to canonicalise to such a young domain? (on same IP C Block)

What would you do?

[Hannah_Smith]

Hello there,

I'm a little confused about your intention here - what are your eventual plans for the old site?

Are you looking to 301 it to the new site at some point? If so, I think rather than creating a new site and 301-ing the old one to it I'd be more inclined to simply implement your new site on the old domain with all of the age and strength - i.e. re-use your strong URLs rather than creating new ones.

Alternatively if you plan to keep both sites going I'm not sure that this is best the solution. Rel-Canonical is a request rather than a directive - as such the search engines can choose to ignore it. Particularly if the pages on the new site are not actually the same as the pages on the old site. As such you may find that the rel-canonical is ignored and the new site doesn't benefit.

I'm also a little worried about having multi-lingual content on the same page - ordinarily in an instance like this I'd recommend creating separate sub-folders to target different languages (e.g. a sub-folder for all of your English pages and a sub-folder for your other language).

I hope this helps,

Hannah

[Greywolf]

Hi Hannah,

thanks for the reply.

The multi-lingual product pages will be split nicely. That is on the cards.

The new site is meant for end users (direct to public) as an e-commerce site, and the client wants/ needs to keep the old domain for his wholesaler network. We can sacrifice its organic traffic.

So we don't want to 301 anything.

I just want to shift SHIFT the bulk of the organic traffic (which is end-user traffic) to the new site.

The pages will be very similar on both sites in terms of content.

[Hannah_Smith]

Hey,

Thanks for the clarification - that makes sense.

In that case I think that what you're proposing should work - as long as the new pages are very similar (ideally the same).

As I said before it's a request rather than a directive so it might be ignored - I've tested cross-domain canonicals before - but not quite like this so it's hard for me to say precisely what might happen.

Obviously I'd also recommend undertaking some link building direct to the new site too - although I'm sure you plan to do that in any case

Thanks

Hannah