Moving content to a new domain

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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
#search engine optimization #content #domain #moving
  • 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.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
    • [1] reply
    • 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
      • [1] reply
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    Moving content to a new domain

    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.