Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
SEO Considerations for merging two brand website into one
-
Hello fellow Mozzers,
We have two websites for two similar brands at my place of employment, the two brands currently serve slighly different products but could be held quite happily under one branded site. As part of a potential group merger into one sole brand, we will have to create one joined up website which will then feature all our products. The newly merged site will also have more scope to allow us to expand our product range where as currently one brand is kind of specific to a particular market due to its name.
So as part of the Merge, I have to consider the potential implications for our search traffic, as this is an integral part of our business.
Brand A - older, more authorative, great content, good organic positions - top 10 for pretty much all terms we favour.
Brand B - younger, but has more marketing scope due to name, still good site and lots of content.
Unfortunately Brand B has more in terms of potential lifespan, but is currently the less authorative of the two sites we run. it has lower DA and PR according to my Moz Analytics, a lower number of quality links and less content. In order to give the Brand B website the boost that is needed and in effect replace Brand A in the serps which has great organic positions, I need to make sure all bases are ticked for an action plan.
So far this is what I have.
- Transfer all exisiting Brand A web pages to Brand B website.
- Rel canonical all Brand A pages to now point to Brand B websites new pages.
- 301 redirect all pages on Brand A to Brand B during the transfer.
- Once 301 redirects are in place then request external sites to actually repoint to Brand B website for any links.
- Update xml Sitemaps
- Update any content that mentions Brand B to now be Brand A.
- resubmit sitemaps to Webmaster tools
- Update all social profiles
- Update all local search profiles and listings
- Update all review sites with new brand name / merge any with both brands
On a supplementary note for customer information, looking to also keep the older Brand A Home page up for a short time to help people understand the transition rather than a complete redirect which to our demographic could confuse and alienate people. Will also look to send a mass email to roughly 400K people informing them of the move abd how it affects them.
I have no doubt there will be some glaringly obvious additions, any further advice would be much appreciated.
Hope you are all well.
Tim
-
hi Tim,
if you have anything that gets a lot of traffic you could move that to the new site like moz.com/rand/ this would help get the crawlers going. I will give you a full crawl and also I am sorry I just Getting back to you.
I am so sorry I did not mean to take this on and I will check your private message I've been so busy.
This is something to hold onto download it and keep it fill it out keep it somewhere safe
http://netdna.copyblogger.com/documents/WordPress-Emergency-Checklist.pdf
SEO gadget change their name recently to builtvisible and made awesome post about how to keep link juice
http://builtvisible.com/surviving-seo-site-migration/
http://builtvisible.com/domain-migration/
http://builtvisible.com/change-of-address/
https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/7-technical-seo-wins-for-web-developers/
https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/a-wordpress-theme-change-seo-checklist/
Sean Anderson at hobo SEO to let the name fool you has a great article
http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/how-to-change-domain-names-keep-your-rankings-in-google/
http://moz.com/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains
I will reply and I strongly recommend running screaming frog SEO spider or deep crawl in fact I will go into your private message right now and start a deep crawl on your site. This will give you everything. http://deepcrawl.co.uk I will also of course run screaming frog and send you the archives.
Sorry it took so long to respond,
Tom
-
Are there any other considerations I may be missing when moving website?
-
These are great links and tips Thomas.
I particularly liked the infographic from Aleydasolis.
Thanks for the help!
-
Thank you Thomas, I am glad it was understandable, I have a habit of waffling on a bit when trying to explain things
What is your username so I can DM you the two domains privately.
Cheers in advance Tim.
-
Hi Tim,
I think you did a great job of writing everything out. Would you mind sharing your URL's with me via private message if you are uncomfortable sharing it here?
I would be very hesitant to tell you to merge sites without knowing what type of content they have.
However having said that Granger.com is a good example of a site that sells just about everything. The only common theme is industrial products. But those range so vastly that you can understand what I mean.
as far as the best way to do it take the domain with the most authority and keep that domain 301 redirect the other domain page by page to it.
Here is some information
- http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-keep-old-url-juice-during-site-switch
- http://moz.com/community/q/301-redirect-subdirectory-to-new-domain
- http://moz.com/community/q/which-page-should-i-301-redirect-to-the-other
let me know if this is enough information I'd be happy to field any questions.
All the best,
Thomas
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Cross Linking two related ecommerce websites
Hi Guys, Hope you'll be able to help me with a technical problem I am facing right now. We are a company right ? We own 2 webistes. Let's say one sells car parts, the other one buys second hand car parts to refurbish them and sell them. (It is not our case, just an example very similar to ours). sellparts.com buyparts.com Both are ecommerce websites, with large catalogues (7000 skus). sellparts sells a lot and is a big actor in its market. buyparts.com doesn't work nad has a really low DA. My new SEO external consultant, which I am not too convinced about, is telling me to cross link the sites on product level using cross-linking extensions. He want have them do-follow. That would mean having hundreds or thousands of links with really similar linking patterns. buy [parts] [model ] [make] sell [parts] [model ] [make] That to me seems a bit too much and I am worried it compromises the sellparts site's SEO. So should i no-follow the links ? Or do it differently ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kepass0 -
Changing Brand and Domain Name - SEO Impacts
Hi everyone I'm hoping a few of you can help me out... We're an online-one retailer and we're currently looking at rebranding.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | piazza
This is for commercial reasons: Our current name is difficult for customers to spell It's not wholly representative of what we now offer We want to push offline and social marketing to help increase or DA In a nutshell, our current name implies 'cheap' and we're moving more upmarket.
Our DA is only 10, and a re-brand will make our brand more marketable.
A stronger brand and DA will help us climb up the rankings quickly - last year we ranked no 1 for a relatively competitive term before dropping a few places. In terms of current traffic: 30% is via SEO (we have a low DA but rank ok for certain phrases) 70% is via adwords We had our website redesigned last year and it performs well.
The idea is to have a new brand logo and colours and move to a new domain.
We will keep all our existing products and content. Please could anyone let me know the implications of this move?
What are potential pitfalls, and what will we need to do to alert Google?
I have read about 301 redirects, would these be required? As always, any help is very much appreciated. Many thanks Abs0 -
SEO time
I wanto to be in the top of the google search. I am usiing a lot of SEO tools but... I have done it during one month. Do I have to wait more?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarlosZambrana0 -
Help! The website ranks fine but one of my web pages simply won't rank on Google!!!
One of our web pages will not rank on Google. The website as a whole ranks fine except just one section...We have tested and it looks fine...Google can crawl the page no problem. There are no spurious redirects in place. The content is fine. There is no duplicate page content issue. The page has a dozen product images (photos) but the load time of the page is absolutely fine. We have the submitted the page via webmaster and its fine. It gets listed but then a few hours later disappears!!! The site has not been penalised as we get good rankings with other pages. Can anyone help? Know about this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
How important is the optional <priority>tag in an XML sitemap of your website? Can this help search engines understand the hierarchy of a website?</priority>
Can the <priority>tag be used to tell search engines the hierarchy of a site or should it be used to let search engines know which priority to we want pages to be indexed in?</priority>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mycity4kids0 -
Splitting one Website into 2 Different New Websites with 301 redirects, help?
Here's the deal. My website stbands.com does fairly well. The only issue it is facing a long term branding crisis. It sells custom products and sporting goods. We decided that we want to make a sporting goods website for the retail stuff and then a custom site only focusing on the custom stuff. One website transformed and broken into 2 new ones, with two new brand names. The way we are thinking about doing this is doing a lot of 301 redirects, but what do we do with the homepage (stbands.com) and what is the best practice to make sure we don't lose traffic to the categories, etc.? Which new website do we 301 the homepage to? It's rough because for some keywords we rank 3 or 4 times on the first page. Scary times, but something must be done for the long term. Any advise is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance. We are set for a busy next few months 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hyrule0 -
Is DOCTYPE important for SEO?
Hello fellow Mozzers. I am just having a brief look at a potential clients website before speaking to them tomorrow and whilst looking at the source I noticed that they don't appear to have a clear definition for their Doctype. All the have at the top of each page is I have to admit that Doctypes aren't my strong point but I know that they are normally slightly more descriptive than this. Can this have any effect on rankings? or is this just an issue for W3C validation? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis0 -
Does capitalization matter for SEO?
Two places capitalization comes into play: (1) on-page use (title, h1, body text, img alt text, etc) (2) external anchor text I didn't think it mattered from Google's point of view for on-page usage (is this correct?) but I notice that OpenSiteExplorer' s 'anchor text distribution' tab shows different counts for the same keyword if it's capitalized in different ways (eg seomoz.org is listed separate from SEOmoz.org). Is that just OSE or does Google treat the keyword/phrase different based on its capitalization, too? And if so, then should I be creating external links to my site with the 'regular' and 'Capitalized' versions of my key phrases?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | scanlin1