Best way to move the content to a different domain without inviting any SERP penalty?

[stj]

Hi all,

We are in a bit of a fix right now. We have around 60-70 articles (Wordpress pages / posts) that we intend to move to another domain of ours. What's the best way to do so such that we do not invite any Google penalty.

Here's a detailed information about our case:
Let's say, our site example.com has more 2000 articles. To help us better position our content for one of the sections on example.com, we have started another website, example2.com and want to move those 60-70 articles from example.com to example2.com.

What is the best way to do it such that we are not penalised by Google? Is it (a) Move all the said content (60-70 articles) from example.com to example2.com and (b) do a permanent redirect (301) of each of the older article URLs to newer article URLs.

What are the other options?

[TomRayner]

Hi Shalin

You've already listed the best option available.

Add those articles on your new website and then 301 the old pages to the new ones.  That is the best possible solution.

Alternatively, you could change the canonical tags on the old website to point to the new website - ie on www.oldsite.com/article-1 you have this canonical tag:  and so on.  However, this is a longer way of doing the same thing as a 301, while the effect may not be instant either.

A third option would be to add a noindex,nofollow tag on the old site pages to deindex the pages.

The last two solutions would let you keep the articles on both sites - but in this case I would not recommend it, because even with the canonical change and/or noindexing, it could be misinterpreted as you looking to flesh out your site with more content that isn't original.  I'd recommend the 301 redirect.

[donford]

100% agree with Tom. There really is nothing I can think to add.

[stj]

Thanks Tom and Donford.. That helped a lot.

We just posted a follow-up question to this over here - http://moz.com/community/q/is-it-possible-to-move-a-couple-of-posts-and-comments-from-one-wp-domain-to-another