Client has blog and main site - current thoughts - how to consolidate?
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So I have several clients who have been blogging for a few years on Blogger and self hosted WordPress. They also have their "main site" on a different URL. What is the current thinking on what to do with the content. The "main sites" could use a bit of a boost and I know the content would help so I know I can 3-1 redirect everything from the current blogs to a new home on the main site.
What I am thinking is to move most of the posts to the main site with redirects, but leave a few posts around perhaps a theme (and maybe writing a few more) and leaving that property up and "open for business" so the links from it have some value to the main site, we can get G-plus author attribution on several sites in their topic of experience and maybe we can get some extra pages to rank in top 7. Does this seem like a reasonable strategy?
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Thanks so much Thomas for your thoughts. I definitely don't want to have duplicate content. I guess what I am still wondering is this. One of the sites is a church and they have their own website in our town. The pastor for the church has been posting his sermons and blogging on blogger. So we are going to move them from blogger to wordpress (big fan here too) and I was just going to redirect everything and in effect shut the blogger site down but what I am wondering now is if it makes sense to leave some remnants of the blogger site behind (beyond just the redirected urls). Maybe we shoud eave a few posts that only appear on blogger so that perhaps we can get an occasional extra spot near the top of the serps for some keywords. I would also not be surprised if having a verifiable history of authorship on blogger that goes back a ways further than any imported page would be factored in by google when looking at the author's authority on the topic (i.e. in this case religion and my home town). Also, having authorship on two different domains would show diversity and help as well.
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You want to redirect from another blog and have it rank on your new blog? keeping both blogs up at the same time? Unfortunately, that will not work. You'll have duplicate content and Google will penalize you because you will be linking to yourself.
do you want to take existing content on the web being used as a blog on somebody else's website and 301 redirect it from the current blog to a secular site?
Well if I'm hearing you correctly. I do think you're saying you own all this content or these clients want you to do this?
If you have content on 3 different sites that you have access to. That you no longer need. I would buy a WordPress template that has a blog and it already. Build the entire website that you are planning on building out of Word press then you will have to follow migration rules in order to get the content on their correctly. You could do 301 redirects and no database swaps. However you will have to of course take down the content that Already exists. you want to go into Google Webmaster tools and let them know you're making this change. As long as it's relevant content. I do not see the harm and it. If it is not relevant, or it is not yours don't do that of course.
I hope I have been of help,
Thomas
PS if you are already using a website that has a blog. WordPress preferably in my opinion but I guess you can use blogger. I would go about redirecting only relevant content if it's not relevant or if it's not yours to redirect don't touch it.
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