: SEO safe way to run beta of new site on seperate domain I run a web site that offers a service that receives over 1 million page views a day and I have completely rebuilt the whole script

@LarsenBagley505

You're correct. Putting your test domain noindex and canonicalizing to old one is enough.

Just remember to look for backlinks after testing. If you get something valuable, do redirect 301 from test domain to established one.

But I would choose a subdomain or subfolder instead of a new domain. A new domain can be good if you have the same name with another TLD, like example.us and example.com if your audience is from US. Just for branding reasons.

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@Steve110

Being honest I'm not sure you'd cause any impact of your ranking on search engines by doing that, but you need to provide a bit more information for me to be sure. If you are running the new script on another domain (domain.com being different to domain.me) then there wouldn't be any impact alone from running on another server.

When you say script, can you be a bit more clear. Is this a server side script? (asp, php etc...) is is JavaScript? or is it an entire new web page layout? (has the html structure of the paged changed enough to effect how it is read).

If the actual structure of the page has changed moving content that would usually be used to assess the relevancy of a page for search engine rankings, then a re-rank may be unavoidable.

Steve

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