Merging domains was probably a mistake. Can it be undone?
-
Hello good people,
Website A was doing great in terms of traffic and ranking.
Website B had seen a steady decline in traffic and visibility for several years, most likely due to thin content issues.Website B was merged into website A. Content was redirected on a per page basis with a rewrite rule that takes domain name and the change in URL structure into account. After merging the two websites, traffic and rankings of Website A started dropping.
What would be the best course of action here?
- Weed out thin content and stick with the merger?
- Removing all of Website B's content and the redirects to Website A?
- ??
Thanks!
- Jan
-
Thanks guys, I'll take a closer look at the history of site B before making a decision. There's no more data to be found in the WMT since it's almost a year ago, but I could recover a long forgotten GA account.
-
Yikes! Sorry to hear you are having this issue.
Site B most likely had something that was affecting it before the merger that caused it be be doing so poorly. I would begin in
1. Webmaster tools. Check for manual penalties, linking domains, crawl errors, crawl history.
2. Check your redirects to see if they are all working from site B to site A. make sure they are all linking to relevant pages, and not all to the home page. Google may get suspicious if you suddenly gain 1000 links to your site, from a domain they were possibly already looking at strange.
3. Look for differences in site A, and why it was successful. Could be that by adding poor quality items or links from site B is affecting site A.
4. "Weed out thin content and stick with the merger? " pretty much. You have already merged the domains, and undoing that would just confuse the hell out of the search engine. They would not know where to look, and for what. Reindexing can take a while, and fixing this issue will require some patience and due dilligence.
-
Site B likely had a manual action or ran afoul of an algorithm and now that's impacting Site A. Your first step should be to figure out why site B had been going down over time, if it's a Panda issue like you suspect or something else. But don't take action until you know what the problem is.
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
-
Domain forwarding or redirects for SEO?
Hi all! A client of mine owns several top level domains which are not in use, let's call them example.nu, example.de, example.net and so on. The current website is example.com.
Technical SEO | | JHultqvist
When checking the technical status of the unused domains I realized that all but one are forwarded (via DNS) to example.com and only one has a 301 redirect. Should I redirect all of them by means of 301 or let them stay forwarded? Very few of the domains have any other sites linking to them. Any thoughts would be really appreciated! Jesper0 -
English and French under the same domain
A friend of mine runs a B&B and asked me to check his freshly built website to see if it was <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> compliant.
Technical SEO | | coolhandluc
The B&B is based in France and he's targeting a UK and French audience. To do so, he built content in english and french under the same domain:
https://www.la-besace.fr/ When I run a crawl through screamingfrog only the French content based URLs seem to come up and I am not sure why. Can anyone enlighten me please? To maximise his business local visibility my recommendation would be to build two different websites (1 FR and 1 .co.uk) , build content in the respective language version sites and do all the link building work in respective country sites. Do you think this is the best approach or should he stick with his current solution? Many thanks1 -
How can I use MOZ to investigate a my recent drop in domain authority?
Between MOZ's last scan of my site and the one before my domain authority dropped from 35 to 29. I'm not sure where to begin investigating this and how I can leverage MOZ in this case. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | bearpaw0 -
Tool to Generate All the URLs on a Domain
Hi all, I've been using xml-sitemaps.com for a while to generate a list of all the URLs that exist on a domain. However, this tool only works for websites with under 500 URLs on a domain. The paid tool doesn't offer what we are looking for either. I'm hoping someone can help with a recommendation. We're looking for a tool that can: Crawl, and list, all the indexed URLs on a domain, including .pdf and .doc files (ideally in a .xls or .txt file) Crawl multiple domains with unlimited URLs (we have 5 websites with 500+ URLs on them) Seems pretty simple, but we haven't been able to find something that isn't tailored toward management of a single domain or that can crawl a huge volume of content.
Technical SEO | | timfrick0 -
Showing My domain twice
I have a question, I am showing my domain twic, how can i have page rank 32 and page rank 44 for the same page? Regards | The UK's Leading Probate Brokers - Lowest Probate Quote guarantee! Probate experts. http://finalduties.co.uk/ 83 (over by 13) 32 1 The UK's Leading Probate Brokers - Lowest Probate Quote guarantee! Probate experts. http://www.finalduties.co.uk/ | 83 (over by 13) | 44 | 112 |
Technical SEO | | Chris__Chris0 -
Two Domains for the Same Page
We are creating a website for a client that will have hundreds of geographically driven landing pages. These pages will all have a similar domain structure. For example www.domain.com/georgia-atlanta-fastfood-121 We want the domain to be SEO friendly, however it also needs to be print friendly for a business card. (ex www.domain.com/121) The client has requested that we have two domains for each page. One for the Search Engines and then another shorter one for print/advertising purposes. If we do that will search engines the site for duplicate content? I really appreciate any recommendations. Thanks! Anna
Technical SEO | | TracSoft0 -
Redirecting a domain
I was setting up a new campaign and received the following error from Roger Robot. "We have detected that the domain www.sitename.com and the domain sitename.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here." I know about redirecting a PAGE using 301 Redirects and how to specify the www. canonical in Google webmaster tools, but is there a "DOMAIN" redirect that I'm missing. What would you suggest doing given the error message above. Thanks, Bill Sqnch.jpg
Technical SEO | | Marvo0