Moving multiple Sites to One Site and SEO Impact/Ideas
-
Hi there,
We are in the process of moving 2 sites with higher page authority to another site we own (that is our company brand), so essentially 3 sites into one.
We're at risk of losing a lot of SEO from the original 2 sites that have all the product information. We are doing this since we merged companies a couple years back and need one web precense.
Anyhow, the site launch date is in 3 months and the recommendation is to start moving content over prior to that for top pages, which is a big undertaking when we are launching all the pages again with new content, redeisgn and moving sites in 3 months. If it's the right move, we should do it, but I just wanted to get opinions on how others have handled something similiar when moving to a site with lower site authority and trying not to lose rankings.
-
Nothing is guaranteed when you move domains. I see the following risks....
we are launching all the pages again with new content, redeisgn
Yikes! New content might not be received as enthusiastically by the search engines. It might not be received as enthusiastically by visitors and they will bounce - sending a bad signal to search engines. If this was my site I would keep the content and the internal linking among the pages the exact same as it is now. If the rewrite is not done in a way that preserves the visitor's pleasure your rankings might fall.
These original sites... if they are popular and have a lot of type in traffic, a lot of branded traffic, a lot of brand mentions, a lot of domain mentions, a lot of good will, a lot of navigational search, then you will be walking away from that. Rankings can be supported more by these signals than by links in many cases. No guarantees.
We are in the process of moving 2 sites with higher page authority to another site we own
I believe that (generally) best SEO practice is done when the strongest domain becomes the host of the content. It then has the ability to pass its authority and reputation into the content being moved there.
**What is the health of these other domains? **
If you can't say that these other sites have clean link profiles, healthy content profiles, etc. then merging them could have some risk. It might pay to check these things out before merging. You know the story about "one bad apple."
-
As long as you implement the correct 301 redirects and keep your original domains live (redirected) you should have minimal impact on your rankings. You will start to see the new pages indexed and ranking in place of the old sites.
Be sure to bring over the content in it's entirety and link to the new page URLs going forward and correct other backlinks if possible.
Your lower authority site should receive a good boost with the redirects to it. Your overall traffic may take a hit in the short term, but merging properties of the same company and focusing your efforts on one site is a good idea in the long run.
Best of luck moving your sites.
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
-
Quick SEO Audit of my site.
Hello, I hope you are doing great. I am working on a website that is related to flea collars for cats and dogs. And I want you to make a quick audit of the site where am I lacking. It could be great if you can help ASAP. You can view my site here :
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Request4peace0 -
Google WMT/search console: Thousands of "Links to your site" even only one back-link from a website.
Hi, I can see in my search console that a website giving thousands of links to my site where hardly only one back-link from one of their page to our page. Why this is happening? Here is screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/VleUf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Multiple, Partial Redirecting URLs from old SEO company
Received quite a surprise when I gained access to the Google webmaster account and saw 4 domains that are link to my clients domain and the number of links for each domain range between 10,000 and 90,000. Come to find out this was a result of their former agency. The business is very local central. I will use the example of a burger place. They main site is burgers.com and burger places are listed by city and state. Their former agency bought several domains like californiaburgers.com and duplicated the listings for that state on this domain. You can view certain pages of the second domain, but the home page is redirected as are most of the city pages with 301s to the main burgers.com domain. However, there are pages on the additional domains that do not redirect, as they are not duplicated on the main domain so nowhere to redirect. Google has only found four of them but looks like there could be at least 50. Pages that are not redirected are indexed by the engines - but not ranking (at least not well). There is a duplicate content issue, although "limited" in the sense that it really is just the name of the business, address and phone number - there is not much to these listings. What is the best approach to overcome? Right now GWT is showing over 300,000 links, however at least 150,000 to 200,000 of that is from these domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeverSEO0 -
It appears that Googlebot Mobile will look for mobile redirects from the desktop site, but still use the SEO from the desktop site.
Is the above statement correct? I've read that its better to have different SEO titles & descriptions for mobile sites as users search differently on mobile devices. I've also read it's good to link build, keep text content on mobile sites etc to get the mobile site to rank. If I choose to not have titles & descriptions on my mobile site will Google just rank our desktop version & then redirect a user on a mobile device to our mobile site or should I be adding in titles & descriptions into the mobile site? Thanks so much for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Best procedure for distributing identical content about your company/site for affiliates to use?
When dealing with affiliate websites, whereby you send them a stock standard bio or info on your company for them to use on their sites, what is best practice? Is is OK to have multiple websites all linking to you with pages that contain the same content? Should I ask them to implement canonical or no-index tags for those particular pages? Should I ask them to rewrite the content (which may be impractical or they're unwilling to do)? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Where would the SEO juice go if I have a wordpress site hosted by godaddy?
I am planning on moving my website to a wordpress that is hosted by godaddy. I am wondering where the SEO juice that my website has already gained would go. Would it go to godaddy when I make the move instead?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SierraPCB0 -
3 results for a site on page one?!?
Hi, I've never seen a website rank on page 1 in position 2, 3 and 4 for one query, completely separate results as well. I thought they limited the amount of results from a website on each page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Best way to preserve site authority / juice when moving a property to Facebook?
Hi, so, I have a website. Let's call it a cooking website with about 300 pieces of content cross-listed among 20 categories. I want to move my entire site, hook line and sinker, to Facebook. My first thought was to do this with a domain-wide 301, as that would preserve most of the authority and juice my site has built over the years... but would this have a corollary effect of unfocusing my keyword strategy? E.g. is there a risk in doing a sitewide 301 to a single landing page, in that some of the juice I'd be passing to my new home page would be from, say, "recipes for jelly donuts?" Has anyone had an experience making a large product transition like this, and are there any current best practices? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kenn_Gold1