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Good morning,

I'd appreciate if you guys could help me with a situation I have at the moment with the company I work in.

We're an online newspaper focused in Technology articles, so have our own writers writing about different tech-related topics.

The problem though, is that our founders thought it would be a good idea to sign a contract with a traditional newspaper to give us a bit of a push in terms of traffic. The conditions of the contract are basically that our website is under their domain (mynewspaper.bigtraditionalnewspaper.example) and in return we get links in their webpage through a few widgets located in different sections. Also, we host ourselves our website and the content is of our propriety. Now, this big old traditional newspaper is many times associated with the far-ish wing political ideology in my country.

And now that the contract is about to finish and we'll have to discuss to them whether to continue with this deal or get out of it, we have the following question:

In terms of positioning and indexing, if we don't renew the contract and the big old traditional newspaper denies our friendly request of redirecting the current urls to a new domain of our own (mynewspaper.example), since they're the owners of the current subdomain we are currently indexing for... Is there any way of fix this situation? Our fears are to have our articles indexed with both the old URLs and the new ones and the old ones leading to a 404 error because the other newspaper didn't want to collaborate. The ideal situation would be them redirecting to the new domain and we handling the permanent redirections so that Google would understand we moved from domain.

How would you guys deal with this?

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  • For myself, this is a property rights and copyright issue that a lawyer must address. Assuming that you have not assigned too many rights previously, your content is your content and any "break" means that you retain full rights to your content. Period. It is that simple.
    – closetnoc
    Nov 1, 2019 at 3:48

1 Answer 1

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  1. The best way is to add 301 redirect.

  2. As another way, you can create rel=canonical from every page of old subdomain to every page of your own website. Guys from oldnewspaper would not even know about it.

  3. If you can add 301 redirect even temporary, so do it and do relocation in Google search console.

So there is no other way to solve your problem.

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