Splitting One Site Into Two Sites Best Practices Needed

[94501]

Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own.

The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter.  The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time.

Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances.

For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority.

Thanks!

[davebuts]

Hi 94501,

I went through this about 6 months ago with a big Australian company. I did pretty much everything you suggested and the transition was very smooth.

Here are my dot point on what I think you should do and answers to your questions:

• 301 redirect pages from old site to corresponding pages on new site.
• Don't worry about nofollowing links from the old site to new site.
• No need to submit requests for old pages to be removed from index - search engines will figure it out with the redirects.
• No risk of the old site losing organic traffic - besides he obvious of not having those pages to get organic traffic, like you said.
• It took 2-3 weeks for G to figure out everything that was going on and index and rank the new site properly.

Only other thing I would add is to make sure you keep things like page titles, heading tags, etc., the same for the pages that are already performing well.

Also, if the new site is using a template that has big changes from the old site, make sure you do all the standard checks to make sure it's 'SEO-friendly' so you don't run into any issues not directly related with moving content to a new domain.

Overall, goal should be to keep the old and new pages as similar as possible - unless you are making improvements!

Cheers,

David

[94501]

Hi David,

Thanks for the insight.Are you saying that two to three weeks later the new site was producing in organic search and if so to what extent compared to the pages on the original site?

Thanks, again! Best... Mike

[davebuts]

Hi Mike,

Yes, after 2-3 weeks we saw the new site ranking well for the same keywords the old site used to and was getting 80-90% of the organic traffic that those pages were getting on the old site.

This was about 6 months ago and the new site now gets more organic traffic than those pages ever got on the old site.

I'd love to hear how things go for you!

Cheers,

David

[94501]

HI David,

Wow, that is better than I would have imagined. If I may ask, what was the PA/DA of these pages and the appr avg moz difficulty of the kws?

This site is like 45 DA 20 PA and usually does okay with kws under 40 difficulty.

Best... Mike