Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Migrating micro site into existing website

    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.

    Migrating micro site into existing website

    Technical SEO
    3
    7
    1276
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • ViviCa1
      ViviCa1 last edited by

      My company is planning to migrate an existing (ecommerce) micro site - which sits on its own domain - into their main ecommerce site. This means that the content will be moved from www.microdomain.co.uk to www.maindomain.com/category. Some products already exist on the main domain.

      The micro site is fairly small with just over 400 pages - I am planning to map each URL to the new URL (exact corresponding page) and create 301 redirects for each. Where any additional content does not exist yet on the existing main domain, we will create it and 301 redirect to it.

      The micro site currently ranks fairly well for some keywords - being such a specialised micro site, (some of) the keywords also form part of the domain name, however, they won't on the main page although they may form part of the URL (category).

      As an example (using a made up URL), our micro site www.bread-sticks.co.uk ranks on page 1 for the keyword bread sticks - we don't just sell bread sticks on www.bread-sticks.co.uk but also rolls and bread though, bread sticks is one category of very closely related categories. Say our main domain is www.supermarket.co.uk (selling a wide range of food / drink products. The micro site will be moving to www.supermarket.co.uk/baked-products/ - which is a category. Within that category, there are sub categories, i.e. bread sticks, rolls and bread which will sit under www.supermarket.co.uk/bread-sticks/ etc.

      What would be the best way for ensuring that our main domain would take over the rankings from our micro site, given that it will be sitting on our main domain as a category (one of many)? Can we expect www.supermarket.co.uk/baked-products/ or www.supermarket.co.uk/bread-sticks/ to replace www.bread-sticks.co.uk in the rankings simply by 301 redirecting?

      Thanks for your help!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • ViviCa1
        ViviCa1 @Yoav-Blustein last edited by

        Thanks, great to hear of someone else's experience with a similar issue. Glad to hear your rankings mostly improved where you had a corresponding page on the main website. Makes me hopeful that the same will be the case for us.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • ViviCa1
          ViviCa1 @EGOL last edited by

          Thanks, good point to keep in mind re. brand mentions etc. I will have a little dig around GA and SC to see where exactly our organic traffic for the micro site comes from to see how much we can expect to lose due to navigational domain queries etc.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Yoav-Blustein
            Yoav-Blustein @ViviCa1 last edited by

            Well, i had a problematic case in my previous position where we had a main/big niche site ranking nicely to many sub-niches. lets call the niche "xxx" and sub niches "yyy xxx" , "aaa xxx" etc..

            To cut down on maintenance we have decided to migrate all 5 sub-niche (micro) sites which all had 1st page rankings for the majority of their respective keywords. Similar to your case, the main and niche sites the had same categories and sub pages.

            We chose one domain to see if everything goes smoothly, we have done the URL mapping while keeping URL renaming to minimal on the main site. 
            Almost on every single page the content on the main site was better, indepth and fresh.
            It was a hard debate, but after some trial and error we decided to go with minimal changes to the main site. 
            Our keywords for the merged pages mostly got better rankings (however we saw some fluctuations like -20, +10 etc for a while.. and all got stable after 2-3 weeks).
            For pages that didnt existed on the main site, after the redirections in most cases our losses were between 3-10 rankings. Some of them we managed to recover with regular SEO efforts and some are still moving randomly between spots/pages..

            go figure 🙂

            ViviCa1 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
            • ViviCa1
              ViviCa1 @Yoav-Blustein last edited by

              Thanks for your reply, Yossi.

              I think I should clarify that it's not just the categories that are already pre-existing but also (most of) the products. They are currently offered both through the main website and the micro site. I only recently joined the company - as far as I know they did try to reword the product descriptions to avoid duplicate content issues, however, I will need to look into how much they actually differ.

              We want to retire the micro site, however, for these specific search terms related to what we sell on the micro site, the micro site does tend to rank better. So I suppose we would want to keep the copy from the microsite if possible?

              In terms of DA, our main website is slightly better than the microsite, but both are very low - 18 vs. 12. I was told they never did any active link building and I cannot find a lot of links apart from our own websites through tools like OSE.

              I have created a list of all existing URLs using Screaming Frog but that is a good point about using a few other tools to verify that my list is as complete as possible.

              Yoav-Blustein 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • EGOL
                EGOL last edited by

                If you move the content and redirect the pages then you get new pages into the SERPs and get the value of redirected links.

                What you don't get are things like brand mentions, domain type-ins, navigational domain queries, visitor behavior, SERP CTR, and more.  The more mature the website the more valuable these other assets might be.  Some of these assets will evaporate with the move, some will be reset to zero and others might be inherited.

                All you can hope for is to do what you can to conserve these things.

                ViviCa1 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
                • Yoav-Blustein
                  Yoav-Blustein last edited by

                  Hi

                  Well it is a practice done often, but do not expect to get the same rankings as you had with the micro-domain, you will see some drops. Some will gain their rankings back and others will need SEO push. The time it takes depends on many factors such as domain authority, site freshness etc..

                  Whenever i go and merge domains or incorporate them, i try to find the best user-friendly category architecture. First it should make sense to the user (how everything is lined up) and than to google.

                  IMO, if all the redirections are done correctly, the only problem that you might have is with the pre-existing categories. I would double and triple check all URLs, run extensive crawls on the site with Moz Crawl (limited no# of URLS though.. ) DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog etc. and look into the URLs. Its amazing how one program cant find some URLs and others do.. You will want to avoid duplicate content issues 🙂

                  Of course i don't even mention how closely you need to monitor everything.. I would do a list of the most important URLs to be transferred, and closely monitor them. Also i always suggest to go with very minimal content changes(also meta changes to minimal).. keeping it as close as to original and only then, after everything is good and healthy, i would go and start making improvements on the content..

                  I know how much time consuming robotic job it is 🙂 so good luck 🙂

                  P.S.: Also it's a good and common paractice to go ahead and contact site owners for the relevant good and natural backlinks that you have gathered over time..

                  ViviCa1 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
                  • 1 / 1
                  • First post
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • photoseo1

                    Redirecting an Entire Website?

                    redirecting domain redirect former site

                    Is it best to redirect an old website to a new website page by page to like pages or just the entire site all at once to the home page of the new site? I do have about 10 good pages on the site that are worth directing to corresponding pages on the new site. Just trying to figure out what is going to preserve the most link juice. Thanks for the help!

                    Technical SEO | | photoseo1
                    0
                  • Chophel

                    My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.

                    Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages.  I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google. Does anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
                    {YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
                    {YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
                    {YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
                    {YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
                    {YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
                    {YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
                    {YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
                    {HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
                    {HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
                    {HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php

                    Technical SEO | | Chophel
                    0
                  • amitdipsite15022020

                    Multilingual website

                    My website is https://www.india-visa-gov.in and we are doing multilingual. There are three options 1. TLD eg india-visa-gov.fr (French) india-visa-gov.de (German) 2. Subdomain eg: fr.india-visa-gov.in (French) de.india-visa-gov.in (German) 3. Folders https://www.india-visa-gov.in/fr/ (French) https://www.india-visa-gov.in/de/ (German) We have tried the 3rd option but need to know whether its better or not for the long term health from SEO. Does the MOZ DA carry better in Subdomain or TLD or Folders? What does MOZ recommend to maintain DA? Thanks

                    Technical SEO | | amitdipsite15022020
                    0
                  • Mediaholix

                    Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?

                    Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO.  It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors'  Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag.  Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.

                    Technical SEO | | Mediaholix
                    0
                  • jarydcat1

                    Merge 2 websites into one, using a non-existing, new domain.

                    I need to merge https://www.WebsiteA.com and https://www.WebsiteB.com to a fresh new domain (with no content) https://www.WebsiteC.com. I want to do it the best way to keep existing SEO juice. Website A is the companies home page and built with Wordpress Website B is the company product page and built with Wordpress Website C will be the new site containing both website A and B, utilizing Wordpress also. What is the best way to do this? I have research a lot and keep hitting walls on how to do it. It's a little trickier because it's two different domains going to a brand new domain. Thanks

                    Technical SEO | | jarydcat1
                    0
                  • kirupa

                    Why did my website DA fell down?

                    Hello, Could you please let me know why might my website's DA have fallen down in merely a week? What might be a reason? I also noticed traffic from google dropped down at the very same week. Will be very thankful for any advise!

                    Technical SEO | | kirupa
                    0
                  • Rezza

                    Migrating to new subdomain with new site and new content.

                    Our marketing department has decided that a new site with new content is needed to launch new products and support our existing ones. We cannot use the same subdomain(www = old subdomain  and ww1 = new subdomain)as there is a technically clash between the windows server currently used, and the lamp stack required to run the new wordpress based CMS and site. We also have an aging piece of SAAS software on the www domain which is makes moving it to it's own subdomain far too risky. 301's have been floated as a way of managing the transition. I'm not too keen on that idea due to the double effect of new subdomain and content, and the SEO impact it might have. I've suggested uploading the new site to the new subdomain while leaving the old site in place. Then gradually migrating sections over before turning parts of the old site off and using a 301 at that point to finalise the move. The old site would inform user's there is a new version and it would then convert them to the new site(along with a cookie to auto redirect them in future.) while still leaving the old content in place for existing search traffic, bookmarks and visitors via static URLs. Before turning off sections on the old site we would create rel canonicals to redirect to the new pages based on a a mapped set of URLs(this in itself concerns me as the rel canonical is essentially linking to different content). Would be grateful for any advice on whether this strategy is flawed or whether another strategy might be more suitable?

                    Technical SEO | | Rezza
                    0
                  • tadden

                    Why is my website banned?

                    IMy website is Costume Machine at www.costumemachine.com . My site has been banned for 1 year now. I have requested that google reconsider my site 3 times without luck. The site is dynamic and basically pulls in feeds from affiliate sites. We have added over 1,500 pages of original content. The site has been running great since 2008 without any penalties. I don't think I got hit with any linking penalty. I cleaned up all questionable links last November when the penalty hit. Am I being hit with a "thin" site penalty? If that is the issue what is the best way to fix the problem?

                    Technical SEO | | tadden
                    0

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.