Migrating from squarespace to webflow and avoiding duplicate content

Dear webflow users,
I am currently hosting my site with squarespace. I already built two sites with webflow and I love it. For this reason I am thinking about migrating my site from squarespace to webflow.

There is just one problem for me. I am using the marquee template which is discontinued by squarespace. This template supports index pages. Index pages contain content from other subpages of the website. Squarespace told me that google do not recognize the content of the index page as duplicate content due to the kind of way in which they programmed the index page. They are using hashtags to indicate that it is an index page which contains content of other subpages. You can get more information on the following link: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205815208-Marquee-Index-Pages-discontinued-
Please look at the section “Index Urls” on this page.

Now, I do not know how I can transfer my website from squarespace to webflow without loosing my google ranking due to a possible duplicate content. Do you have a solution how I should organize my pages in order to avoid internal duplicate content?

To make it clearer for you I want to explain it more concretely. My current website is https://www.klavierstunde-muenchen.de . The homepage of this site is an index page which contains the following 4 pages:

https://www.klavierstunde-muenchen.de/konditionen

The links of the index page sections are:

Actually I did not want to use the subpages, but I needed to build them in order to use them to build the index page. These subpages are now also indexed by google.

My question is now if it is possible to migrate my site from squarespace to webflow without having a problem of duplicate content. I was planning to rebuild every page in webflow of my current squarespace site. But this could cause duplicate content as my index page and the four subpages which I mentioned contain the same content.

I would be very happy if you could help me to find a solution for this problem as I would love to migrate my squarespace site to webflow.

Thanks a lot in advance and best regards!
Tamino

Hi @taminoferrari excellent question!

Within each of your pages what you can do is add a canonical tag to make sure search engines realize that it is the source of truth.

You can learn more about canonicalization from this resource: Canonicalization - Moz

Essentially on each of your subpages you will need to add a canonical tag.

So for example for:

You would add a canonical tag in the page settings in the before closing </head> section like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.klavierstunde-muenchen.de/klavierlehrer" />

You can also create redirects of those pages to your actual site pages using our 301 re-directs feature as is needed.

I hope that this is helpful :man_bowing:

Dear Waldo,

thanks a lot for the answer. I am aware of the 301 redirect and canonical tag solutions.

Actually I would like the homepage of my website be the source of truth as it is the page which should be indexed by google. For this reason I thought about either deleting the subpages and link the url subpages via 301 redirect to the homepage or put canonical tags on each subpage with a reference to the homepage. Which solution would you prefer?

Thanks again and best regards
Tamino

Great question @taminoferrari!

Typically it’s good to get multiple pages from your site indexed and receiving traffic. You can only really optimize each page on your site for so many keywords and still provide relevant information on each page.

Currently your site is set up with each of your subpages having a canonical tag on them:
CloudApp

So my recommendation would be to keep the consistent setup of each of the subpages with the canonical tags on them. Feel free to include the content on your home page as well, but search engines typically index content from their sources. Deleting the sub pages would most likely have a negative impact on your current rankings.

Hi @Waldo Hope you are doing great…!
I currently have content living on a Squarespace website which I want to transfer over to the new version of the website, which will be designed on Webflow.

The same host and domain will be used.

As far as I understand, in order to keep the SEO rankings of the domain, I would need to:

  1. Copy over all content from Original Site to New Site.
  2. Match URL structure of New Site to Original Site
  3. Once all done and confirmed, change Hosting Settings on Webflow to point to domain, update DNS Settings accordingly with hosting provider. Revoke/remove old DNS settings.

Do I have this correct? Am I missing anything? do i need to apply 301 redirections? (squarespace link redirection to webflow) or webflow will automatically apply the redirection?

Thanks!