Old website, new domain name

[OliverBainbridge]

Hi,

We have an old website which is currently being 301'ed to a new domain name / bespoke e commerce website as we're rebranding and having an increase in the range of products we will be selling.

My question is can we keep the original e commerce website selling the original products under a new domain name and escape duplicate content issues with the product descriptions as we have copied & pasted product descriptions to the new website ?

I'm looking to the future and building another domain name will help with future expansion plans / thoughts.

Both websites are registered to us at the same business address if this helps.

Please feel free to ask questions if I haven't worded this very well!

Many thanks in advance.

[SEODinosaur]

To avoid duplicate content, you should probably 301 all those pages as well. If not you can deindex them in your Google webmaster tools.

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Oliver-

Keeping the original site has its advantages for additional SEO and the ability to effectively create a defensive URL which could show up with the new site in search results.

Definitely a NO for copying and pasting the product descriptions. There are a lot of very informative posts on this issue.  Some SEO folks say that you have to change over 50% of the content on the new descriptions to register as original content. We have done some work in this area and have found that rewriting all of the descriptions to some extent, is the only way to generate additional SEO value. (Obviously skus will probably stay the same). Another easy thing to do is to be able to change the meta tag descriptions for the photos. That will count towards the original content "meter".

You will get some short and long term value if you take the time to rewrite the product descriptions.

Hope this helps. If so, let me know....

Mark

[OliverBainbridge]

Hi,

Sorry I should have made it clear that the new domain name on the old website (or rather a copy of it) was to allow it to trade as a stand alone business.

What I'm doing is Old Website - Re Branded New Website with all original content replicated and 301 across to keep rankings (1000+ top 3's). We will then add additional categories and products to expand.

I am then left with a Magento website that I would like to "start afresh" with from the beginning and build it up as we have done over the last 2 years with the first one.

This is where I have 1000+ products and need to know if I have to change the product descriptions just trying to save a lot of work!) even though Google can see I own both domains and host them on my own server.