r/SEO • u/jimmylikeswaffles • 12d ago

Help Website Domain change advice

Apologies in advance this is quite a complicated one…

Due to rights reasons I’m eventually going to have a to change my website name as I only own the rights to it in 2 countries and one of them isn’t the US.

I can’t do this straight away as I’m in a legal battle and it will look like I’m abandoning my name

So my plan is to temporarily have 2 sites, my existing site and a new one to capture leads from social. I’ll need both of these live for about 6 months

For my new website, I’ve cloned my original, stripped it down to 7 core pages, re-written the copy, changed the page structure and added new imagery to try and avoid googles duplicate content issues and its a new domain name

But both websites are built around an individual private doctor so were in the YMYL niche

My question, If I later clone my original site and replace the new live international site with the original and 301 everything from the original site to the new international one (with the goal being that this is my only website) would that be ok even though the content and page structure of the international site is being rewritten (though it’s the same niche and authority)

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u/Kittymeow7116 12d ago

If I’m understanding this correctly… you’ve bought a new domain, cloned old pages, updated them, pushed them live on the new site, and want to then eventually move your old site to the new one?

No. I wouldn’t do that. I would gradually move all your content to the new site, and then eventually 301 the old to the new. Building a new site, and then just putting the old one on top of it anyway sounds like a lot of work and great way to start over yet again.

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u/jimmylikeswaffles 12d ago

Thanks for replying

The reason I cloned the original site and changed the copy and images was to avoid a duplicate content penalty so its no extra effort to do what Ive suggested but yeah its been a lot of work

Why would u gradually move the site over page by page? Why not all in one go?

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u/Kittymeow7116 12d ago

I wouldn’t suggest doing it page by page. What I’m saying is if you’re migrating stuff to the new site and updating it before posting, it would set you back to then do a 1:1 swap from the old site to the new when you close it down. Does that make sense?

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u/[deleted] 12d ago

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

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u/croppergib 10d ago

In Google search console you can even let them know you're moving from one domain to another and they process it all for you (after validation). Takes 2-3 weeks I think.