Merging domains was probably a mistake. Can it be undone?

[jansievers]

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?

1. Weed out thin content and stick with the merger?
2. Removing all of Website B's content and the redirects to Website A?
3. ??

Thanks!

• Jan

1pYROKn

[jansievers]

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.

[David-Kley]

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.

[Kingof5]

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.