Domain migration strategy

[Charlie_Coxhead]

Imagine you have a large site on an aged and authoritative domain.

For commercial reasons the site has to be moved to a new domain, and in the process is going to be revamped significantly. Not an ideal starting scenario obviously to be biting off so much all at once, but unavoidable.

The plan is to run the new site in beta for about 4 weeks, giving users the opportunity to play with it and provide feedback. After that there will be a hard cut over with all URLs permanently redirected to the new domain.

The hard cut over is necessary due to business continuity reasons, and real complexity in trying to maintain complex UI and client reporting over multiple domains. Of course we'll endeavour to mitigate the impact of the change by telling G about the change in WMC and ensuring we monitor crawl errors etc etc.

My question is whether we should allow the new site to be indexed during the beta period?

My gut feeling is yes for the following reasons:

• It's only 4 weeks and until such time as we start redirecting the old site the new domain won't have much whuffie so there's next to no chance the site will ranking for anything much.

• Give Googlebot a headstart on indexing a lot of URLs so they won't all be new when we cut over the redirects

Is that sound reasoning? Is the duplication during that 4 week beta period likely to have some negative impact that I am underestimating?

[EGOL]

I have no factual data on this... just going with my gut....

Based upon how Google is acting these days I would not take chances with having two copies of the same site in the SERPs for an entire month.  I would not want to see any pages on the new site filtered for being duplicates.

Most people don't get a new site indexed and those redirected domains normally go fairly well. So, I would be pleased with that and not take chances.

Safety might be better than going for some unknown gain.

[Charlie_Coxhead]

Thanks very much for your thoughts. The root of my uncertainty is indeed the way Google in particular is viewing duplciated content today.

What if I told you that the site was a business directory and that the new site would be a big improvement in terms of on page optimization? By which I mean new/different (and much better) page titles and improved internal linking. I mention this only because the new site won't a direct replicar of the old one. Make a difference?

[Entrusteddev]

Agreed, though Charles could use canonical tags to tell Google that the new pages are authoritative. This may take a while to be indexed, but should prevent any detrimental effects with duplicate content.

[Charlie_Coxhead]

Hi Aran, thanks for your response.

My thinking has also evolved a bit and I'm now thinking we ought to exclude the new site until we're ready to cut over as @EGOL suggested.

The critical info I didn't mention before was that there is important client ROI and reporting reasons that we need to ensure that the current site continues to perform right up until the cut over, at which point the 301s will be implemented. The cross domain canonical would address the dupliaction, but would also start to depreciate the current pages prematurely.

The thing that I was underestimating before was the negative impression that the new domain would give Google when it suddenly appeared with 1M+ pages of duplicate content plus no real link profile of its own (until we implement the 301s)...all the hallmarks of a scraper.

Better I think to avoid this by excluding the beta until we cut over, and make sure we prep well for that.

[EGOL]

My opinion of risk goes up much higher if this is a directory vs a site with original content articles.

[Thos003]

I wouldn't sweat it.  We left up www.bulwarkpest.com for several months while moving to www.bulwarkpestcontrol.com .... I know that there is some risk in it. But I think Google is pretty understanding of site migrations. Of course I am just a small pest control guy so they may not have ever noticed. Sooo.. take that with a grain of salt.

It's does make it easier to have the other site live so that you can redirect on a per page base and know that it's working. I would rather make sure the redirects are correct and working prior to moving the entire site over. But be warned.. site redirects may not always give you the same authority... research the online Yellow Pages.