Canonical tags required when redirecting?

[Eblan]

Hello,

My client bought a new domain and he wants it to be the main domain of his company. His current domain though has been online for 10 years and ranks pretty well on a few keywords. I feel it is necessary to redirect the old domain to the new one to take advantage of its ranking and avoid any broken links.

The sites are exactly the same. Same sections and same content. Is it necessary to place canonical tags on one of the sites to avoid duplicate content/sites?

Any thoughts?

Thanks

[MikeRoberts]

If you're 301 redirecting everything to proper, relevant alternative pages on the other site then there's no reason to canonicalize the page.

[ThompsonPaul]

If you use 301 (permanent) redirects, there's no need for canonicals on the old pages because as far as the search engines are concerned, you're telling them the old pages no longer even exist. In fact, done properly, you can actually remove the old site altogether after a month or 6 weeks of the redirects being in place. (You point the old domain to the new site and place the redirects in the new site's .htaccess file)

This kind of move can be a big deal for a site that's been around for 10 years. Hopefully there's a compelling reason for wanting to change the domain name? Business rebranding, for example?

Paul

[Eblan]

Thanks a lot Paul and Mike!

Sorry for the late response.

Yes, the new domain is all about rebranding. Also, their old domain was too long.

[ThompsonPaul]

Welcome, Eblan. Also, don't forget to use the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster Tools as an additional signal to Google for the domain change.

Paul

[Eblan]

Hey Paul,

Thanks a lot for the info, to be honest I didn't even consider that. saved my life there.

And I hope Google doesn't take long to index the new domain.

Cheers!

[ThompsonPaul]

There are number of other signals you can send the search engines to try to speed up indexing of the new site, Eblan.

• once new site is live, resubmit xml sitemap to both Google And Bing Webmaster Tools
• use Fetch as Googlebot and Fetch as Bingbot on each Webmaster Tools to crawl and submit the most important pages from each of the most important sections of the site
• earn some new links to the pages of the new site (social media is especially useful for this - remember to update address in all SM profiles)
• request that high-value links pointing to old site are updated to new site (this can take some outreach to other webmasters - start this process well before the new site is to go live).

Hope that helps?

Paul

P.S. Here's an extensive SEOMoz post on the steps to implement and monitor a domain migration. And here's a great migration checklist infographic. You're going to want to get  as much of this right as possible, as there can be considerable risk when doing this kind of major change