This isn't exactly new, news - I covered this in 2014, but with the news around Dejan getting hit badly by a manual action, his plan is to move to a new domain and not redirect the old domain to the new. But John Mueller from Google rained on his parade, if you can call it a parade, by saying Google will find you.
John Mueller from Google said "Just to state the obvious, since the sites are the same, Google will treat them the same & pick a canonical for the combined signals. You don't necessarily need to do a 301 to have it be seen as a site move."
Here are the tweets:
My biggest SEO experiment has just begun!
— DEJAN (@dejanseo) August 24, 2019
1. New domain: https://t.co/RuH0lOmkwK
2. Will not 301 anything.
3. Will ask everyone to update links.
After this I expect maybe 20% of my previous link profile at least, up to 50% if I'm lucky.
John responds:
Just to state the obvious, since the sites are the same, Google will treat them the same & pick a canonical for the combined signals. You don't necessarily need to do a 301 to have it be seen as a site move.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 26, 2019
Dan responds:
Thank you John, I wrote about the effect here https://t.co/PFjK8oJXGe and of course we are still very busy trying to understand what caused the penalty. The contribution I made to the disavow file so far isn't good enough in my opinion for me to submit a reconsideration request.
— DEJAN (@dejanseo) August 26, 2019
Then someone else chimed in with more questions:
Canonicalization uses more than just external links, but happy to forward examples to the team if you see anything problematic happening in that regard.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 26, 2019
This will be a super interesting case study for the SEO community when it is all set and done - if it is can ever truly be "done."
Here is Dejan's response to this story with my thoughts:
well, this is manual, so super easy since you documented the move.
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) August 26, 2019
This usually applies to folks that want to keep their practices, and don't change anything on the new domain.
— Pedro Dias: ~/pedro$ (@pedrodias) August 26, 2019
Unless there's an algorithmic canonical intervention, there wouldn't be much to worry here
Forum discussion at Twitter.
