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Hi Roman,

Good question. I've dealt with this issue quite a bit. I think one element worth considering is the quality of the posts and what stood between them and organic success. I've found that pages on our site often didn't succeed for reasons that were in fact fixable. So, before declaring search success bankruptcy on them, I've tried to breathe new life into them... if the content warranted it. This could be adding content, refocusing on a different keyword, improving the link profile of the page or the on page elements. In any case, making good content isn't easy, so best to not lose some that could have worked.

Having said that, I've 301'd one helluva steaming truckload of old/failed pages and had good success, as well as a warm satisfied feeling afterwards. Best of luck!

Mike

Hi Neil,

Congratulations on the first client! That is so great!!

In my experience, this is not really an issue. Some businesses share addresses... just a real world fact of the matter. Your client's search success will depend on dozens of other things before this.

Best of luck!

Mike

HI David,

Wow, that is better than I would have imagined. If I may ask, what was the PA/DA of these pages and the appr avg moz difficulty of the kws?

This site is like 45 DA 20 PA and usually does okay with kws under 40 difficulty.

Best... Mike

Hi Charles,

I would suggest fetching it in Google Search Console and selecting the option to render the page. You'll then see what Google sees.

I looked at it in Google Page Speed Tool and the results are not encouraging:: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Famericasinstantsigns.com%2F&tab=desktop  0 out of 100

Otherwise, there could still be another kind of a bank shot where this issue affects search. That is that if enough people come and it doesn't load for them you will generating some bad user signals, such as visitors bouncing back to the SERPs. That would then hurt search.

I'd consider all of the above.

Best of luck! Mike

Hi David,

Thanks for the insight.Are you saying that two to three weeks later the new site was producing in organic search and if so to what extent compared to the pages on the original site?

Thanks, again! Best... Mike

Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own.

The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter.  The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time.

Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances.

For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority.

Thanks!

Have you signed into Moz lately and also activated the search overlay under the "M" icon?

I just tried it in Chrome and it worked for me.

If it still doesn't work, you might try re-downloading the toolbar.

Best... Mike

Are you using the Moz's Firefox toolbar? There was a recent notice about it being down for awhile.

Well, I like Gaston's answers on these boards and at the same time was curious if that seemed like the concensus.... leave it cause no real risk.

A belated "thanks, Peter!"

Here's an update. Went with LakeNameBoating.com/boat-rentals. It all worked out great. Thank you all for the help.

Here's an update fellows. After a couple of months of data it seems pretty clear that the unordered list content has really refreshed the majority of these old forum discussions. By including other resources in the unordered list, they also convert better. Thanks!

Update: 5 months later, the problem has long since gone away.

Thanks, Egol!

I did it myself and went for kind of a top items approach. In the end, it took about 6 hours.

Thanks... Mike

Thanks, Gaston!

Any other insights, folks?

Mike

Thanks Russ and Rand! I've used many tools for getting to the bottom of estimated volume and have high hopes for your evolving KW Explorer. It's definitely needed.

Thanks for the heads up. Please let me know when Firefox is working again.

Best... Mike

Hi Becky,

Beyond the hypothetical limit, would be the consideration of dividing the link authority of the page by a really large number of links and therefor decreasing the relative value of each of those links to the pages they link to.

Depending on the page holding all these links, user experience, purpose of linked-to pages, etcetera, this may or may not be a consideration, but worth thinking about.

Good luck!

• Mike

Are you talking about displayed in SERPs, a report on a web page or a downloaded excel file?