How best to handle partial domain move?

[esseljay]

The scenario is this, we have a website eg: ABC.com where the content is in two language folders (en-us and en-gb).

We have created a new brand with website XYZ.com for the USA market. Of course, this domain will take a while to rank because it is completely fresh.

My question is how best to deactivate the en-us content on the old site to:

a) prevent it showing up on Google US
and
b) pass the US traffic to the new website to boost its rankings

I was thinking of removing the en-us pages from ABC.com and using a 410 error page containing a link to XYZ.com
Would it be better to replace the content on en-us instead (with a link)?

I'm not keen to use a straight 301 redirect as sometimes we get traffic from other countries to the en-us content.

Thanks in advance Mozzers

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

Look into the use of HREF Lang tags, they could help you out by still having two sites, not redirecting the pages and having them show up in search engines for both regions/ languages. if you haven't heard about it, you can find more information on them here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

Hope that helps a bit.

[esseljay]

This post is deleted!

[esseljay]

Thanks Martjin, the first site does use href lang tags but we want to lower the profile of that site in the USA and pass some link juice from it to the new USA website.