Duplicate content problem?

[devbook9]

Hello!

I am not sure if this is a problem or if I am just making something too complicated.

Here's the deal. I took on a client who has an existing site in something called homestead. Files cannot be downloaded, making it tricky to get out of homestead. The way it is set up is new sites are developed on subdomains of homestead.com, and then your chosen domain points to this subdomain.

The designer who built it has kindly given me access to her account so that I can edit the site, but this is awkward. I want to move the site to its own account. However, to do so Homestead requires that I create a new subdomain and copy the files from one to the other. They don't have any way to redirect the prior subdomain to the new one. They recommend I do something in the html, since that is all I can access.

Am I unnecessarily worried about the duplicate content consequences? My understanding is that now I will have two subdomains with the same exact content. True, over time I will be editing the new one. But you get what I'm sayin'.

Thanks!

[gmk1567]

Since you can edit HTML, adding canonical on your homestead  pages would be able to avoid duplicate issues. In addition, canonical helps to consolidate link values to preferred page (your new sub domain page).

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Let me know if you need more details.

[devbook9]

Thanks!

After posting my question, I got thru to what they call "level 2" support at homestead. They advised to delete the files from original account after I successfully copied to new account. I asked if that would lead to 404 error, and was told no.

Does that sound right to you?

[VentaMarketing]

If the new files use the same names (URLs), then you will not encounter 404 errors.

[BrianJGomez]

Maybe I'm missing something, but why would you not move all the content to a new site and just be done with homestead.com? Surely your client is missing the opportunity to brand their own url right?

[gmk1567]

I assume that old and new sub domains are different (sub1.example.com and sub2.example.com).

You will lose historical link values if you delete files from the current sub domain/homestead.

I recommend you to retain the current sub domain/homestead as long as possible.

[loopyal]

I know of homestead, from many years ago, but not enough to know the inner working of it.

With most systems like that you can't add canonical tags and you can't do redirects.

I don't even know if you can make a webmaster tools for it.

For a business, homestead is a very bad idea.

If you could make a webmaster tools, you could do that, then set up the domain on a shared server and build the site there, then tell webmaster tools you are moving the site. If you know of incoming links, you could ask the other sites to change the links.

Maybe someone else here has better internal knowledge of homestead.

Unless they are receiving substantial traffic, you may be better off starting fresh, then change all the pages on homestead to address some particular part of their business, with completely different (related) content, and have links from that to the new site.

I just saw bjgomer13 say the same.