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Moving content to a new domain

by altesino
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I started a niche gardening website a few months ago and have manged to build some traffic with some good backlinks. Backlinks were mostly achieved through guest posting and broken link building. While I could definitely continue to build the site as is, it was really just intended to be a practice site as I'd been away for a couple years and the online world has certaintly changed! (it's gone well but I've also learned lots of things that I wouldn't do again). Realistically the niche is a bit narrow and doesn't monetize that well.

With that as a background, I wanted people's thoughts on leveraging the content and links I established on this site for my next project.

My next project will be in health and wellness and I think gardening could be a logical sub-section of the site.

It appears based on Matt/google's guidance
https://support.google.com/webmaster...er/83105?hl=en

  • I can copy my content from the old site to the new site.
  • Put 301 redirects on the old pages to forward backlinks, etc to the new pages
  • use the google change of address tool
  • I should also reach out to the people who currently provide links to the old site and explain the move and request they update their site.
Anyone have any experience doing this or something similar?

Thanks
Chris
#content #domain #moving
  • Profile picture of the author Kevin Maguire
    Originally Posted by altesino View Post

    I started a niche gardening website a few months ago and have manged to build some traffic with some good backlinks. Backlinks were mostly achieved through guest posting and broken link building. While I could definitely continue to build the site as is, it was really just intended to be a practice site as I'd been away for a couple years and the online world has certaintly changed! (it's gone well but I've also learned lots of things that I wouldn't do again). Realistically the niche is a bit narrow and doesn't monetize that well.

    With that as a background, I wanted people's thoughts on leveraging the content and links I established on this site for my next project.

    My next project will be in health and wellness and I think gardening could be a logical sub-section of the site.

    It appears based on Matt/google's guidance
    https://support.google.com/webmaster...er/83105?hl=en

    • I can copy my content from the old site to the new site.
    • Put 301 redirects on the old pages to forward backlinks, etc to the new pages
    • use the google change of address tool
    • I should also reach out to the people who currently provide links to the old site and explain the move and request they update their site.
    Anyone have any experience doing this or something similar?

    Thanks
    Chris
    Yes I have, and I can tell you the whole Google integration part is a waste of time.

    But yes you can do that.

    But don't wait for Google WMT to recrawl, de-index and pass over the juice. Just go ahead and set up the content and redirects, then remove the old site from the index yourself.

    If you'd rather not remove it and wait for Google to do the transfer for you, enjoy waiting over 6 months.
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    • Profile picture of the author altesino
      Kevin
      Thanks for the help. I've been working on my new site and did everything google says to do.

      Specifically,
      • I copied my content from the old site to the new site.
      • Put 301 redirects on the old pages to forward backlinks, etc to the new pages
      • use the google change of address tool
      • And reached out to try to get other sites to update their links from the old site to the new site. (I would guess I've been able to move about 50% of the links over) The rest still need a 301 redirect.
      I did this in mid-May and everything seemed to work well. My rankings for the old content moved to my new website, etc.

      Then in mid-June I had a pretty big drop. I lost about 90% of my traffic and over the past month it's dropped to nearly zero.

      There's so many variables here so I'm looking for some help.

      I doubt it's due to my backlinking strategy as I'm still just guest posting on relevant sites.

      If I had to guess I think it could be my site map. My new site still has it pending in google's webmaster tool. is that the issue? If so how to I get google to process it.

      Thanks for everyone's ideas!
      Best
      Chris
      Signature
      PBN links available: Many niches & each domain only has 10 OBL.
      PM to Guest post on Buzzfeed style 5 year old site. DA 38 / PR 4 / 300+ linking domains.
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      • Profile picture of the author SEO Power
        Originally Posted by altesino View Post

        Kevin
        Thanks for the help. I've been working on my new site and did everything google says to do.

        Specifically,
        • I copied my content from the old site to the new site.
        • Put 301 redirects on the old pages to forward backlinks, etc to the new pages
        • use the google change of address tool
        • And reached out to try to get other sites to update their links from the old site to the new site. (I would guess I've been able to move about 50% of the links over) The rest still need a 301 redirect.
        I did this in mid-May and everything seemed to work well. My rankings for the old content moved to my new website, etc.

        Then in mid-June I had a pretty big drop. I lost about 90% of my traffic and over the past month it's dropped to nearly zero.

        There's so many variables here so I'm looking for some help.

        I doubt it's due to my backlinking strategy as I'm still just guest posting on relevant sites.

        If I had to guess I think it could be my site map. My new site still has it pending in google's webmaster tool. is that the issue? If so how to I get google to process it.

        Thanks for everyone's ideas!
        Best
        Chris
        You should have redirected the gardening site to the gardening section of the health and wellness site, not the root domain.

        As for the sitemap, make sure the url you entered is valid. Delete it and resubmit it.

        Did you use My Blog Guest to find sites to guest post on? If so, that could have caused the penalty since sites added to My Blog Guest were penalised sometime this year.
        Signature
        ONE HOUR INDEXING - STOP WASTING MONEY ON LINKS GOOGLE NEVER FINDS
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        • Profile picture of the author altesino
          SEOpower thanks for the response.

          Respond to your points:
          You should have redirected the gardening site to the gardening section of the health and wellness site, not the root domain. I did this page by page. Very time consuming.

          As for the sitemap, make sure the url you entered is valid. Delete it and resubmit it. I've deleted and resubmitted 2 or 3 times now. I've waited a week or 2 in between.

          Did you use My Blog Guest to find sites to guest post on? If so, that could have caused the penalty since sites added to My Blog Guest were penalised sometime this year. Nope. I've literally done this manually. I did about 30 for gardening and 5 or 6 for health and wellness. The health and wellness have been posted since my ranking hit.

          Any other ideas?
          Signature
          PBN links available: Many niches & each domain only has 10 OBL.
          PM to Guest post on Buzzfeed style 5 year old site. DA 38 / PR 4 / 300+ linking domains.
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