Multiple Links to "old site"

Marketing
1

I am planning to “move” my site to a new domain. Because the site is relatively young with few inbound links, the plan is to set up the new site and gradually move the content across.

During the transition period (probably about 3 months) there will need to be multiple links from the new site to the old site (i.e one-way links only).

Is it safe to do this? We want to avoid any SEO penalty! We could of course make the links no-follow if this would help.

p.s we are aware that we need to be careful about duplicate content penalties (shouldn’t be a problem as we will be re-writing most of the material for the new site).

2

You didn’t really say why, but assuming it’s because there are links to the old site out there in the wild. A better approach here is to do redirects via htaccess. That is, on the old site, redirect old pages to their equivalents on the new site.

There aren’t penalties, as such. It’s possible that the search engines will just ignore the duplicate content. But that’s not always the case. And if the content is different in some way, I’d wager it’s even less likely.

Anyhow, if you redirect the old pages to the new ones, the issue won’t exist anyway. :slight_smile:

1 Like
3

You might find this article from Google helpful, although it deals with the more usual situation of setting up the new site and then closing the old, rather than the kind of gradual transfer you’re describing.

(I can’t help feeling that having content in one of two places will annoy your visitors no end; they won’t know whether they should visit the old or new site for whatever they want.)

1 Like
4

Thanks so much for your reply. I have read the article which is a useful one.

I did not make myself very clear. This will be simply a transitional arrangement. So we will link from the new site to resources on the old site (just until those resources have ben moved on the new site… but this will need some work first as the front end is being redeveloped).

Once the resources are on the new site we will obviously replace the links to the old site with internal links.

My concern is to make sure that this won’t incur any penalty from Google whilst we have lots of external links going to the old site.

5

This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.