Reply To: I know the absolute obvious answer to this, but for a website relaunch & migration to a new eCommerce platform, the owner and a third party are ADAMENT about running the new website and the old website simultaneously, live online, for customers to use either site. Please confirm this is dumb.

This is stupid.

So, I’ll give you a real world story that happened to me personally.

The B2B company I word for bought another company that fits it perfectly and expands the product line and capabilities. This company they bought also had a B2C side to it. So that’s 3 sites.

I was brought in to market both companies separately, update and maintain 3 sites, perform digital and traditional marketing to both b2b and b2c, social media, marketing planning and execution, ad buying and spending…the whole nine yards. (btw, I need to get a raise).

So, one thing I was told to do was to integrate all the information of the 3 sites across ALL 3 sites. So in theory, all three sites having duplicate content “in case someone goes to one of the sites looking for something on another site”.

What happened is this, all the sites cannibalized each other and ratings tanked. This was within 6 months.

So since now everything was shit, I designed one new website, and pointed all of our URL’s to that site with a 301. After a year, I dropped all the URL’s except the brand URL.

What happened? All of my pages are on the first 3 google results pages, my branded terms are all first page.

But let’s talk repercussions outside of the website and digital realm. On e of the biggest issues was that everyone in the company had a different email address. It was either @/yyy.com or at @/zzz.com or @/rrrr.com. This confused clients as they went and made an order a xyz and gets a response from an email that’s [abc.com](https://abc.com). We lost sales due to that. Google didn’t know what to do with that.

Making it as simple as possible and a straight line to get from a-z is what won for us. Not only in Google’s eyes but also in the client’s. After our mistakes, it took well over a year to get in the black again and regain what we lost. It all could have been avoided.

Your plan is sound and is the correct path. Finish the site, fire the third party guy because he’s scamming the company out of money, and get on to the next project.

Bosses are bosses, but they need to know their place and trust their employees. They need to be able to admit to themselves they know jack shit about this (and even less by hiring a 3rd party). If they can’t trust you, then go to another company that does value you.