Website Redesign - Duplicate Content?

[CamiloSC]

I hired a company to redesign our website.there are many pages like the example below that we are downsizing content by 80%.(believe me, not my decision)Current page: https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/New page (on test server):https://servicechampions.mymwpdesign.com/air-conditioning/My question to you is, that 80% of content that i am losing in the redesign, can i republish it as a blog?I know that google has it indexed. The old page has been live for 5 years, but now 80% of it will no longer be live. so can it be a blog and gain new (keep) seo value?What should i do with the 80% of content i am losing?

[Guest]

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[Moreleads]

Hi,

As a general rule its fundemental to maintain pages that are relevant for your audience and generate organic traffic so i would say yes its a good idea to republish as a blog.  Furthermore because i see that a big part of these pages (though i don´t know exactly which 80% you will loose) are pages that are a perfect fit for a blog, like how to and informational articles.

Would be good to maintain the same url´s to avoid redirects but depending on the cms being used that might proof more difficult.  At least maintain meta data and redirects with 301´s.

I also saw you were using third party reviews in schema markup on your current site (but not,yet, on your new site) and this is not a good idea as this is against google´s guidelines (more on this here http://searchengineland.com/google-updates-local-reviews-schema-guidelines-257745)

Success with your new site

[Roman-Delcarmen]

If some page is useful for your users or audience you dont delete that page.
In your case is not your desicion, so you have 2 alternatives,

1-Redirect those pages to another page with similar content (it has to be a better content than the orginal)
2-The other option is add a canonical tag, basically you will trasfer the authority of the old page to the new one.

But there is one factor that you need to keep in mind, that factor is the URL. If your new page will use the URL of the old page, there is no reason
to keep live the old pages because from the google perspective you would be replaced the old pages.

Example

https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/ ----> Old Page with old content
https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/ ----> New Page with New content

From the Google perspective your new page is replacing the old one, so Google need to recalculate the rank of the page (links, content, ux ect).

So no matter, if your republish the content in your blog and then you add some cannonical tags

Example
https://servicechampions.com/blog/air-conditioning/ ----> Old Page with old content

To Google the constant parameter is the URL if change it change the ecuation. My advices, Dont change the URL structure, keep the same URL structure and add some improvements.

Example
https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/ ----> Old Page with old content
https://servicechampions.com/service-air-conditioning/ ----> New Page with New content

And then to avoid duplicate content issues add the canonical tag the older page so in that way
you will trasfer the authority from the old to the new page

Read this article will help you a lot

Canonicalization

A Step-by-Step Guide to Updating Your Website Without Destroying Your SEO

[CamiloSC]

Hello James,

I appreciate your two cents, greatly. I too am not a huge fan of the new site, but I am giving it a shot. Our current site is content heavy and ranks well for our terms. The change in design is geared to converting more leads (calls and forms). So I am giving this change a shot which is aimed to a less technical audience. People looking to fix their ac. I just hope that the new site still keeps its rankings. All urls will remain the same.

[CamiloSC]

Hello Ramon,

Interesting that you mention the schema markup. It will be on the new site as well. Just yesterday I guided the redesign company to include such markup. Last week, i did receive a google message though my webmaster tools (console) stating that i had potentially spammy code. So what i did, was i added the reviews (from Yelp, Google, Facebook, BBB) to the footer of my website. They were not on the site prior to last week. Once i added them, i filed a reconsideration request explaining what i did and why i did it, google responded saying they approve and they removed the manual action. So once again, our website displays star ratings on the SERPs. see attached image. They were showing prior to last week manual action. then they were removed on i received the manual action. after i added the reviews to the site's footer, and filed a reconsideration request, the manual action was removed and the ratings re-appeared in the SERPs.

The new site will keep all its urls. They will not change. Just the content on a few core pages. So i am gathering that it is ok to make the content that will be deleted into a blog.

ajGsh

[CamiloSC]

Thank you Roman for your response.

I forgot to realize that Google will recalculate the rank on the new page. My concern is that the new page rank (although keeping the same URL) will loose some ranking.

If i create a new blog post with the content that is not used in the new page (same page url), and i use a cannonical tag on the new blog post linking to the redesigned page, will the new blog post be indexed and possibly out rank the page i am transferring content from?

[Guest]

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[Moreleads]

Hi Camilo,

Interesting as google states "Only include critic reviews that have been directly produced by your site..." on https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/reviews#local-business-reviews.

I can only imagine they didn´t realize these reviews were not produced directly by your site because of the way you implemented them in the footer.

[Moreleads]

Hi Camilo,

now i am really confused, if you want to maintain the 80% pages and you said they will remain the same url when you make them accessible in your blog.

so

https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/air-conditioning-installation-and-replacement/ --> current site (accessible directly homepage though main navigation)

https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/air-conditioning-installation-and-replacement/ --> new site (accessible through blog)

than why would you need canonical at all and why would you loose rank (besides some lost due to the fact the page is not linked directly from the homepage but from the blog)?

Maybe i am missing something

[CamiloSC]

Hello Ramon and James,

Sorry for the confusion.

https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/air-conditioning-installation-and-replacement/ --> current site (accessible directly homepage though main navigation)

will also be available on the new site, with the same URL.

The reason why i post this question is, on the new site, i will be reducing the content on this page (and others) by 80%. That 80% worth of content from the current pages in question, will not exists in the new site. It will not be on the new site because all the content on some pages have been considered to be too exhausting for clients to read and convert to a lead. We have created the new website, same urls, with leaner content to drive more conversions. Less overwhelming to site visitors.

For example, on this page: https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/ 
there are two segments under subheadings: What is an air conditioning system? and another called:  How an air conditioner works.
Both of these segments will not be in the new website.

Well, i want to republish the lost content as new blogs. My question was, since the soon to be lost content is currently indexed in google, if i republish them as a new set of blogs after the new site goes live, so will Google see the new blogs as duplicate content since it already has been indexed by them?

[Moreleads]

Hi Camilo,

thanks for the clarification.  As this content wil not be available anymore on the "old" pages it will only exist on the newly created blog pages there will be no duplicate content issues.  These newly created blog pages with the content removed from "old" pages will start from scratch for ranking. and the "old" pages could loose some ranking because you reduced the onpage ranking.

This is not per se bad as it is part of your strategy to improve on conversions (which should be the most important kpi anyway).

You could help these new blog pages a bit by linking to them from the "old" page.