Hi,
I’m looking for some advice from someone with good SEO knowledge - and who is kind enough to answer my question.
I have a client who is rebranding - i.e. changing their domain name in the coming weeks - i.e. moving from olddomain.com
to newdomain.com
. They have an Irish office and have just added a French office. I have setup the website with the French section in a folder olddomain.com/fr
which is ready to go live.
The French office wants to launch in the coming week on the new domain name (newdomain.com/fr
) as they are new to market and want to start fresh with the correct name while the Irish side of the business will need a few months before it is ready to change over to the new domain name (newdomain.com
) .
The solution I have in my mind is to set up newdomain.com
as an alternative domain on the current website and remove the default domain in the project hosting settings - essentially creating two separate sites. I know that this works and have used it on other sites temporarily previously. This means that if someone goes to olddomain.com
, that is the URL that shows in the address bar and if they go to newdomain.com
, that will also show in the address bar. I am then going to setup rel=“canonical” for each page which will point to olddomain.com/page-name
so that Google does not see the different websites as duplicate content.
Then once the Irish office is ready to switch over to the new domain, I will set newdomain.com
as the default address in the Webflow hosting settings (i.e. Webflow creates a permanent 301 redirect for every page on the old domain) and change the rel=“canonical” on each page to point to the new domain olddomain.com/page-name
.
In your opinion, are there any SEO issues here? Or any possible issues?
Thanks in advance for your time.
Diarmuid