Moving blogs to different domain

[Mysites]

Hey guys,

We currently have some blogs on one of our pages (fraserisland.com.au) and we are launching a complete rebranding of our sites. We want to move the blogs from fraserisland.com.au to the new parent page of travelfreedom.com.au (but still link it to fraserisland.com.au), however I don't know what affect this will have on the ranking of the blogs.

The biggest thing I'm worried about is that the domain will be completely different, and not a sub domain, but I'm not sure what impact this will have on the effectiveness of SEO on the blog.

Thanks guys

[Guest]

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[MoosaHemani]

You said but still link it to fraserisland.co.au. From this you mean a same blog post can be access from this and the new URL?

-          Two different URL containing the same content will be considered as duplicate content, which is defiantly not a good idea when it comes to rankings!

-          If you 301 (let’s say you do it right) the URL from old domain to new domain. This will eliminate the duplicate content issue but redirection does lose some amount of link juice so your rankings will see a dip for few days and weeks if not permanent.

-          If you set cross domain canonical, this will allow the user to see the same blog post on two different URLs but search engine will only crawl the preferred version so it will be two pages for user but search engine will only consider the preferred version. Not really a good idea in my opinion as I hope most of your blog traffic is coming from search engines anyways…

I think whatever step you will take the rankings are going to change (temporary or permanent) so you have to keep your strategy designed accordingly.

Hope this helps!

[Mysites]

Thanks Josh!

[Mysites]

Thanks Moosa! That helps heap. I think the best practice is to just keep the blogs on their current URL, and then put in a 301 from the new parent domain to the existing blogs. That way people can find the blogs through the parent domain and be direct to the existing Urls. Would you agree?

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Lehia

Given that your site has relatively low domain authority right now of 17 and to eliminate user (and your) confusion, I would 301 redirect every individual blog URL to the corresponding new URL on the new domain. It's possible you may lose some ranking - but let me ask:

• how much traffic do you get from the blog right now?
• I bet there's a typical 80/20 pattern where maybe a small handful of blog URLs are getting more of the traffic?

Point being, I would really do what's best in the long-term and to consolidate your brands/domains. I've performed and seen many migrations perfectly fine.

One last thing!

1. Crawl your old site or somehow gather up the old URLs from the old domain
2. Throw them in Screaming Frog in List mode
3. Export the "Redirect Chain" report
4. And undo any redirect chains

I talk about that a little here.

Also, make sure you continue to allow Google to crawl the old domain (don't block it with robots.txt).

[evolvingSEO]

Thanks Moosa! Just want to clarify a few points to be sure they don't get mis-understood by other readers:

Duplicate content

• just want to make sure they know, although duplicate content is not the best thing, there is no penalty per se

Cross Domain Canonical

• search engines will in fact crawl both versions. They will just not index the one with the canonical tag pointing to the source page.

[MoosaHemani]

Thanks Dan! I totally agree with you...

[MoosaHemani]

I think this way the Ranking fluctuation will be none to minimum.