Migrating a page to different domain on multiple pages and keeping the authority
Hi SEO forum,
A newbie here. I have a question regarding moving (copying) a page from one domain to another while splitting the moved content into more posts. I would also like to keep the original post on the old domain as it is. But in terms of authority, I would like to give credit to the new domain.
Why do I want that? It's a portfolio piece written to demonstrate certain skills and the post is not relevant to the services of the old domain page.
The new domain page is however exactly about the topic I wrote about in my portfolio on the old domain page, thus could rank far better.
Besides, the original post is too long and not so relevant for the old domain apart from the portfolio value - it doesn't need to rank there. I figured my other website could benefit from it much better, but I would like to split it into multiple posts.
So basically I need to
- copy/migrate a post from the domain 'olddomain.com/xyz' to 'newdomain.com/xyz', '/yyy' and '/zzz'...
- 'olddomain.com/xyz' doesn't need to rank but should keep it
- 'newdomain.com/xyz', '/yyy' and '/zzz' should get all the possible authority.
Hope this is clear. What is the best way to do this in terms of SEO?
Thank you! Cheers, Jonas
I see potential duplicate content issue there.
Technically there is no reason to have two exactly same pieces of content living on two different domains. You either link to the resource or write article on that topic yourself.
Maybe someone can help how to sanitize your approach to avoid potential penalties, but I would either keep it where it is or move it and 301 from old location to the new one.
You should tell search engines that, URL olddomain.com/xyz is canonical to URLS,
- newdomain.com/xyz
- newdomain.com/yyy
- newdomain.com/zzz
In this way, new pages will be main pages to be crawled by search engines and the old domain page will be treated canonical to these new domain pages.
A long text doesn't mean you should break it up into pieces. What is the benefit you try to achieve with this?
What a long text need is an index after the introduction. So visitors will find fast the needed information.
After publishing you give the old page a 301.
What @jaap said - table of contents (better navigation) should help if your only concern is TLDR.
Thank you everyone for your reply.
I was hoping to tackle the issue of duplicate content using canonical links. But to my amateurish luck, I realized that the old page is not even indexed (i read that in GSC).
So I will create a robot.txt file on the old one to prevent it from being crawled and set YOAST plugin to not show it to the search engines.
So is it me, or am I really lucky and re-publishing it will actually be easy?
@jaap I want to split it because it's over 2500 words with separate case studies. It is very rich content describing a phenomenon with its 3 different types. I have potentially lot of images and videos to complement all. So to me, this is a perfect basis for 3-4 new pages that I was hoping I could more easily interlink to more relevant content.
@ms Although the table of contents is a good idea!
My advice is don't split. Make it cornerstone content. Create perfect navigation. Support the article with some good backlinks and a link from the homepage.
(Did you spy on your top 3 competitors for the main keyword(s)?