Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Acquired a client with an ecommerce site of about 150 pages. Has two domains pointing to it: bluewidget.com and bluewidgets.com. Not 301'd, because the client didn't know about that.
bluewidget.com is the official domain - it's on the letterhead and invoices, it's the domain used for brochures, product packaging and PPC, and about 120 of the site's pages are indexed, with mixed ranking and traffic.
bluewidgets.com has only ONE page indexed, the home page. It's got top #1 rankings for almost every conceivable keyword. A large majority of the traffic AND revenue come from this domain - better than 60%.
Is there any way to sort this out without risking his taking a huge hit? I hate it, but I'm tempted to leave it the way it is.
After the SERPs have been cleaned up, then you could add the domain-wide 301 redirect, wait a few indexing cycles, and then remove the on-page canonical tags.
This should be safe if you go slow.
The advantage of adding the canonical tag on the pages a few at a time is to avoid 'shocking' the search engines when you can instead guide them gently.
The advantage of ending up with a 301 redirect is that it will put a stop to the continuing creation of incorrect-domain backlinks: Any Webmaster visiting the site using the non-canonical hostname will be redirected to the canonical domain, and this will reduce the chance that he/she would create links to non-canonical URLs.
Jim
I suppose in the grand scheme of things, as long as he owns both domains, maybe that doesn't matter so much.
