Moving low ranking domain

[RoxBrock]

I have a website, that I rewrote great content for, but I recently found that there are many, many links going to the subdomain that may be pulling it down.

Has anyone had experience taking down a site and then moving the content to a new site? Will it be considered duplicate content if you completely take the old site down and use rel="canonical" on new site pages?

I don't want to lose the good content, but I cannot have it on the current URL with all the bad backlinking (it's a complicated situation, as I need to keep those backlinks which are affiliates).

Thank you.

[toddmumford]

Hi Roxbrock, can you pm me your example?

Thanks,
Todd

[James-Distinction]

Hi RoxBrock,

I'll try to clarify a few points for you:

1 - It can't possibly be duplicate content if you take the old site down. Only if you create a new site with identical content and keep the old one there too.

2 - You can't use rel="canonical" on pages you are deleting (assuming you remove the old site). Instead, you should look to create 301 redirects

Be careful redirecting the old pages to the new URL, since you might inadvertently penalise the new URL. A better tactic might be to try to remove the old 'bad' links and then take stock from there?

Hope that helps!

[dohertyjf]

Hey Rox -

Great question here. I'm going to try to give an answer, but I'm also going to put in a few questions to help clarify things.

First, I doubt that the subdomain is pulling down the www. if the subdomain has a lot of bad links to it. This is assuming it's example.domain.com and not the www.domain.com in itself (www is techincally a subdomain).

If you want to move the content from the subdomain, why not move it to the main domain and not 301 the old URLs? Instead, add the new URLs to the XML sitemap and link to them internally. Then, put either a 404 or 410 status code on the old pages so that they drop out of the index and the links are not affecting your site anymore.

If you do want to move the content to another site, but you think you have either an algorithmic or manual penalty, do not 301 the old URLs to the new domain. Instead, go about building up that site like you would any new site.

I hope this helps.

John

[CleverPhD]

Agree with John.  I would also not 301 the old URLs to the new.  All that would do is pass the negative link equity from the old site to the new and you are right back where you started.

Kill the old site with a 410, or even better, you can go into GWT and verify yourself for that sub domain.  Then you can put in a request to have that entire subdomain removed from Google.  You then put up a robot.txt and it is gone.  This will also prevent the old site from being found again by Google for all the links.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663427?hl=en

We use load balancers on our servers and once had a subdomain www1 that got indexed and there were even some FB shares etc.   We ended up going this route to get it out and keep it out of the index.