Moving content

[seo1212]

I have www.SiteA.com which contains a number of sections of content, a section of which (i.e. www.SiteA.com/sectionA), we would like to move to a new domain www.SiteB.com

Definitely we will ensure that a redirect strategy is in place and that we submit a sitemap for SiteB

Three Questions

1. Anything else I am missing from the migration plan?

2. Since we are only moving part of SiteA to SiteB, is there another way of telling Google that we changed address for that section or are the 301s enough?

3. Currently, Section A  (under SiteA) contains a subsection where we were posting an article a day. In the new site (SiteB), we decided to drop this subsection and write content (but not "exactly" the same content) under a new section.

During migration, how should we handle the subsection that we have decided to stop writing?

Should we:

A. Import the content into SiteB and call it archives and then redirect all the urls from subsection under SiteA to the archives under SiteB?

OR

B. Do not move the content but redirect all the pages (365 in total) to where we think the user would be more interested in going to on SiteB?

Note: A colleague of mine is worried that since the subsection has good content he thinks its necessary to actually move the content to SiteB. But again, looking at the views for the archives it caters for 1% of the the total views of this section. In other words, people only view the article on the day it is written.

I hope I was clear

Your help is appreciated

Thank you

[MichaelYork]

301 redirects are the way to go.

It won't hurt to import the content if it is of value to the clients, the reality is you will 301 redirect each page-by-page so it would make sense to have the content from prior.

[seo1212]

Thank you for your reply regarding (3).

So if

1. We think its of no more value to the visitor. (the unique views for the archives count for less than 1% of the viewed content)

2. It's time sensitive content i.e. content that is written about situations of the day

3. We have decided not to continue writing under this section any more on the new website

Do you think it still makes sense to import such content? My only problem is how google will perceive the fact that 360 pages will drop off from the current site it is on and not even be present on the new site.

This is tricky because really we are doing two things:

1. Migrating to a new domain a big part of a section from the current domain and 2. we are looking at how we can better streamline/improve content.

Maybe it just makes sense to import everything we have from the old domain and then after we successfully launch the new site, we look at how we can better streamline/improve content

[DavidKidd]

When moving content to a new site, I feel it is important to move as much as you can and leave little behind if you want all your pages to rank the same. The problem with moving pages and content is all the INTERNAL links, title tags, etc that make the website rank. It is much easier to delete pages after the whole website is moved. It very hard to put back all the Internal links and title tags. Yet these elements are critical to how people navigate your site and how google looks at the way you have supported the information on your website by linking to additional internal content relative to any particular page. In most cases if a website is ranking for multiple keywords in their business niche deleting any of the old pages, is just not necessary and may be harmful, until that page becomes a 'problem' to ranking, bad links to it, or simply not indexed anymore. Remember it is a counting game for most Internal links. So having 50 old pages linking to a new upper level and visible page, you want to rank, is very helpful. Even if the content is not something you want visitors to find, it is easy to leave the old content out of direct navigation on the new site so the only people that see it are from searches anyway and will be a small number of people. Everyone wants only high ranking pages, optimized to rank for particular keywords but that is rarely what happens. And google knows this, so having a mixture of poor pages and great pages actually will keep you from any negative points with google.