Migrating a site from a standalone site to a subdivision of large .gov.uk site
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The scenario
We’ve been asked by a client, a Non-Government Organisation who are being absorbed by a larger government ministry, for help with the SEO of their site.
They will be going from a reasonably large standalone site to a small sub-directory on a high authority government site and they want some input on how best to maintain their rankings.
They will be going from the Number 1 ranked site in their niche (current site domainRank 59) to being a sub directory on a domainRank 100 site). The current site will remain, but as a members only resource, behind a paywall.
I’ve been checking to see the impact that it had on a related site, but that one has put a catch all 302 redirect on it’s pages so is losing the benefit of a it’s historical authority.
My thoughts
- Robust 301 redirect set up to pass as much benefit as possible to the new pages.
- Focus on rewriting content to promote most effective keywords – would suggest testing of titles, meta descriptions etc but not sure how often they will be able to edit the new site.
- ‘We have moved’ messaging going out to webmasters of existing linking sites to try to encourage as much revision of linking as possible.
- Development of link-bait to try and get the new pages seen.
Am I going about this the right way?
Thanks in advance.
Phil
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Hey Ryan
Thanks for the input. Will definitely focus on the strongest content they have and work from there.
Will explore possibilities for a 404.
Phil
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Yep your game plan is pretty good. Since they may not be able to do a lot of editing after its up, you may want to gear your research towards finding their best ranking pages and using the content/markup of those pages as a basis for the new pages. If its possible, create a 404 page that can recommend pages based on keywords in the URL. If thats not possible, at least get a search bar on the 404 page.
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