Move Pages From One Domain To Another - The SEO Friendly Way

[Townpages]

Hi All,

One of our clients is a hair salon, that's currently dividing into two separate entities.

For over 10 years the hair salon has been for both men and women, but that's now changing.

The company is splitting into two, the original website contains pages for both men and women, but will soon only contain pages for women's hairdressing.

The problem I have here is that there's probably around 20-30 service pages that get really great, targeted traffic on the men's side.

There's a brand new domain for the men's hairdressing company and I'd like to know how you'd go about retaining the SEO value instead of just culling the pages.

I'm thinking that we should maybe take the content from the original website, re-write it slightly to match the new brand, add it to the new website and then 301 the pages on the original website across to the new website.

Has anyone had any experience in doing something like this before? and will the SEO value move across to the new domain? Also, I'm scared that the internal pages of the new domain may hold more authority than the home page and could cause problems.

Any ideas on this would be great.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Steve,

First of all, don't worry about internal pages being added that have a 301 feeding them. Remember that link juice flows all ways, not just continues down a site structure.

I think I understand what you mean above, and I would copy the content from the old pages, produce them on the new site and then have a 301 that points from the existing pages to the new pages on the mens. All this tells Google is that the content has moved from one location to another and it doesn't need to get any more complicated than that.

By all means, rewrite the content if you feel it needs a bit more of a mail spin, but a cross-domain 301 is not an issue.

Google talks about these issues here as well.

-Andy