Multiple domain names - No "default" - Using rel="canonical"

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

Hi @Diarmuid_Sexton,

Actually everything you have described here will work. I do not see any immediate issues. The only thing that could be an issue would be the UA code from Google Analytics and the connected search console code.

I actually just went through this with another site and did exactly what you just did.

Thanks Brandon - it makes sense to me too but was just checking to see there was no flaw in the login! Think I’ll give it a go. I’ll let you know if there are any issues!

Thanks for your time.

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