Automatic subdomain redirection programmed over a given period?

[Simon-]

Hi all,

I have a technical problem that is quite beyond my "expertise", and I'm wondering if someone can help me to find a way to handle this.

My website automatically changes appearance and some content as well twice a year (summer and winter), and we also change the sub domain, like this:

• September to may > www.nameofmysite.com
• and june to august > summer.nameofmysite.com

I know it's a bit tricky, and we're doing this with a 303 redirection and will also provide a possibility (via a button) to switch beetwen "seasons".

To sum up, during the "summer" I've got:

http://summer.nameofmysite.com/webzine/news/name-of-my-page.html

and during the "winter":

http://www.nameofmysite.com/webzine/news/name-of-my-page.html

As you can see, it's the same content, with a temporary redirection 303.

Thanks you very much in advance!

Simon

[Chris.Menke]

Would having two home pages, each with primary navigation to the current season's site and the footer having navigation for the other season site work and then switching those home pages out as seasons change be a solution?

But, if the content is the same between the two domains, why have two domains in the first place?

[Aleyda]

Hi Simon,

I agree with Chris comments. The way you're implementing the "seasonality" update is certainly not the most SEO friendly nor the easiest to implement (by replicating your entire structure in your main and a sub-domain, which is not the best from a user experience, architecture and crawling perspective, even if you manage to not fall into content duplication issues by using canonicals or noindex, follow meta robots).

There are many websites that update their content based on the season, for example, take a look at how Zappos does it, by enabling many offers in the available spots of their home page, giving them enough visibility, that take the user towards a internal landing pages gathering the offers targeting that season (which are the ones that will rank for those season keywords and you can re-use each year) or directly to the categories of the type of products in offers. If you need to update your look and feel you can do it without touching the Website structure, by updating your menu, text, background colors through CSS and even enabling some additional design elements, that won't affect the site architecture.

I hope this helps!