Tips to Merge Two Domains?
-
Hi all, my client assigned me to merge both their two domains.
To cut the long story, at the moment they have, for example, domain1.com and domain2.com. Practically, they sell quite the same products but with different content and layout. This has been happening for several years: domain1.com came first then domain2.com a couple of months after.
They noticed that domain2.com has now more traffic than domain1.com. Another reason is they want to use one placeholder to avoid brand confusion (as expected because the products are actually the same).
So, they are planning to merge the brand into domain2.com.
I think this is just the same as moving domain, isn't it?
I have been preparing all things as per SEOmoz SEO Guide: How to Properly Move Domains and Google's moving your site .
Do you have any other tips to include?
I want to make sure that the domain moving will be successful and the link juice on domain1.com can be transferred to domain2.com .
Many thanks for your help!
-
Ah, thanks about it. Withdrawing a change of address is what I looked for.
Just in case if there is a need to revert.
-
yep, here is a reference source for the change of address.
-
Thanks, Luis. I feel the same way, too. That is one of the reasons my client finally decided to merge the brand.
-
Hi SEO5,
Thanks for your input. Yes, I am working on this, just to make sure that the mapping will be as relevant as possible.
By the way, have you had experience for "change of address" on Google Webmasters to set domain1 back to domain1 again?
This is just in case.
Many thanks,
Christian
-
think the best thing you can do is do a 301 redirect, maintain two websites can be complicated in your case it seems unnecessary.
-
Hi Christian,
You highlighted excellent sources for reference. You can apply the 301 redirect to move the domain. Ideally 301 the specific pages to domain 2 that relate to the same product info as domain 1. This way when someone clicks on a product page for domain 1 that is still ranking , they see a similar page on domain 2 when they are redirected.
-
Hi Exequiel, I am a bit confused now. Your reply seemed to contradict your first one; which I thought you were in support to migrate the domain.
You, however, raised a valid point here. Nevertheless, sometimes it is a risk due to business decision and to avoid brand confusion.
We will be still keeping the domain1 after migration, so we can have mitigation plan if this doesn't work.
I also want to seek everyone's opinion on this matter.
-
Hi Christian, In my opinion I wouldnt do it. I tell you why... Imagine that now you redirect your site to the one that is ranking better, and in a few months you receive a penalization on this site... you are going to loose everything. I think the best option is conserve your second site. Actually you can use it to test new seo strategies
-
Hi Exequiel,
Thanks for your inputs, these are also in the links above.
Just wondering if there is anything else I need to be aware of
-
Hi Christian,
The appropiate way to do it is with a 301 redirection, and you have to put it on Webmaster Tools too.
Good luck!
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
-
Subdomain vs totally new domain
Problem: Our organization publish maps for public viewing using google maps. We are currently getting limited value from these links. We need to separate our public and private maps for infrastructure purposes, and are weighing up the strengths and weaknesses of separating by domain or sub domain with regards SEO and infrastructure. Current situation: maps.mycompany.com currently has a page authority of 30 and mycompany.com has a domain authority of 39. We are currently only getting links from 8 maps which are shared via social media whereas most people embed our maps on their website using an iframe which I believe doesn't do us any favour with SEO. We currently have approx 3K public maps. Question: What SEO impact can you see if we move our public maps from the subdomain maps.mycompany.com to mycompanypublicmaps.com? Thanks in advance for your help and happy to give more info if you need it!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eSpatial0 -
Duplicate content due to parked domains
I have a main ecommerce website with unique content and decent back links. I had few domains parked on the main website as well specific product pages. These domains had some type in traffic. Some where exact product names. So main main website www.maindomain.com had domain1.com , domain2.com parked on it. Also had domian3.com parked on www.maindomain.com/product1. This caused lot of duplicate content issues. 12 months back, all the parked domains were changed to 301 redirects. I also added all the domains to google webmaster tools. Then removed main directory from google index. Now realize few of the additional domains are indexed and causing duplicate content. My question is what other steps can I take to avoid the duplicate content for my my website 1. Provide change of address in Google search console. Is there any downside in providing change of address pointing to a website? Also domains pointing to a specific url , cannot provide change of address 2. Provide a remove page from google index request in Google search console. It is temporary and last 6 months. Even if the pages are removed from Google index, would google still see them duplicates? 3. Ask google to fetch each url under other domains and submit to google index. This would hopefully remove the urls under domain1.com and doamin2.com eventually due to 301 redirects. 4. Add canonical urls for all pages in the main site. so google will eventually remove content from doman1 and domain2.com due to canonical links. This wil take time for google to update their index 5. Point these domains elsewhere to remove duplicate contents eventually. But it will take time for google to update their index with new non duplicate content. Which of these options are best best to my issue and which ones are potentially dangerous? I would rather not to point these domains elsewhere. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajiabs0 -
Sub Domain
Hi everybody, My competition has started to use the sub-domains vastly. He has created one sub domain for every single city and keyword. Is it something that I should be worried of? Is it a good idea I start doing the same thing? Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Armin6660 -
SEO for one web site two domains
I have web site www.sxxxcafe.com and there is a another domain for the same like xxx.com .How can i use second domain for the same web site keeping SEO up and without loosing ranking .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0 -
How do you build domain trust and authority ?
I am doing some link building and was hoping to get some clear information about the quality of the links and what I need to build a higher domain trust and authority. My sites page I wish to build for has: DA 22 PA 33 MR 4.6 I am looking at back links with these figures Considering outbound links are equal, which pages can help build my page ? page1 DA 66 PA 48 MR 4.8 page2 DA 66 PA 35 MR 3.75 page 3 DA 66 PA 28 MR 3.5 page 4 DA 41 PA 18 MR 2.73 Page 4 DA 41 PA 18 MR 1.87 Do I need back links with a Domain Authority Higher than my own ? PA higher than my own ? or MR higher than my own ? or would any of these pages be able to improve my own ? Thank you in advance for helping with this as I do not want to spend 6 months building the wrong links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90 -
Merging three sites to one
Hi guys, I just wanted confirmation if this is the right way to go about doing this. I need to merge three websites and I've never done three websites in to a brand new site before. Ok so we have Sitex.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Profero
Sitey.com
Sitez.com We've created a SiteB.com SiteB.com has SiteB.com/SiteXCat
SiteB.com/SiteYCat
SiteB.com/SiteZCat Each X,Y and Z have over 1,000 pages. They only have about 10 pages each with Page Authority above 10 and the domains arn't that strong. What i plan to do is: 301 redirect each site domain (X,Y,,Z) to it's corresponding category. e.g. Sitex.com > SiteB.com/SiteXCat 301 redirect each page off X,Y,Z that has a Page Authority above 10 to their new pages on SiteB.com Then, I'm unsure if i should 410 every other URL... I don't think its worht 301 every single URL if they arn't in search results much - but maybe it is if they have a lot of inbound links even with low page authority? Any ideas and does the above seem the best practise? Thanks.0 -
Keyword as domain- worth buying it?
Hi, I just noticed that a top keyword for our industry is available as a domain, but for around $2,500.00 USD. For example, www.chicagoplumber.com. If we already have a pretty well established online identity as, let's say, www.chicagopipes.com, would it be worth buying the new domain and making it our primary? Thanks for your feedback! -Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WillWatrous0 -
Consolidating 3 regional domains
We recently took the decision to consolidate 3 domains for .com.au, .eu and .us. This decision was made before I arrived here and I'm not sure it's the right call. The proposal is to use a brand new .co (not .com isn't available) domain. The main reason is in terms of trying to build domain strength towards one domain instead or trying to grow 3 domains. We re-sell stock simlar to hotel rooms (different industry) and our site is heavily search based. So duplicate content is an issue that we hope improve on with this approach. One driver was we found for example that our Autralian site was outranking out european site in european searches. We don't want to only hold certain inventory on certain sites either because this doesn't work with our business rules. Anyway if we are to go about this, what would be the best practise in terms of going about this. Should we suddenly just close one of the domain and to a * 301 redirect or should we redirect each page individually? Someone has proposed using robots text to use a phased approach, but to my knowledge this isn't possible with robots.txt, thought a phased individual page 301 using htaccess may be possible? In terms of SEO is 1 domain generally better that 3? Is this a good strategy? What's the best 301 approach? Any other advice? Thanks J
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Solas0