Possibility of duplicate content and other issues while changing CMS

Hello there.

I'm wondering if some of you guys could help us with our situation. Unfortunately at this time our company have no indoor SEO expert because we had quite a hard time with them and management decided to fall this burden on ourselves. I decided to reach out there hoping some of you could provide something meaningful. You are our last hope

So now we have a knowledge base of our product with more than 140 articles. We used ZenDesk system to manage it. And we have a plan to start a new KB based on WordPress and migrate all the content into it. We made this decision because we were unhappy with SEO level that ZD was able to provide for us. Whereas, WP is a way more powerful tool in terms of SEO. It has Yoast plugin and other stuff that is proven by the whole world.

And our biggest concern at this time is how should we replace the old knowledge base with that bunch of articles which a new one, that is on WordPress... The biggest risk there is a possibility of getting our new or old knowledge base penalized by Google because of duplicate content issue. We assume that we likely should keep only one version of the site to avoid this situation... But the situation requires more measures to be taken, probably, that's why I'm asking.


We tried to develop some kind of plan and gather knowledge from the internet. For the most part, they recommend to use canonical tag for the new content and noindex nofollow tags for the old content to take it off the track. But the situation remains to be quite foggy for us. What should we do first? How to deal with the old content? What issues should we expect and be ready to tackle?

We really want to hear what you guys think and we would be appreciate for every word you post.

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Regards, Vadim V.

 

While you migrate from old site to the new one. Just redirect them correctly. Its the simplest solution.

 

@mrb1129 got it. But what about duplicate content issue? How to prevent this issue and possible others?

 

Don't worry about it. You own both of the sites, right?!! Just redirect them correctly its the hard and the most important element.

 

@mrb1129 yeah, I own both of them.

 

Yes, I think redirecting won't have any issue for the duplicate content because both sites are owned by you only.

 

As a side note. You may and probably will lose traffic, but in a couple weeks after the move it all should get back to normal. Every time you make changes of that sort (changing the CMS, drastically redesigning the site) you're guaranteed to lose traffic / rankings. Just keep that in mind and don't panic when your traffic suddenly drops.

 

@MilesWeb thank you!

@qwikad.com thanks for letting me know! OK, we will be ready for that.