Merging two Wordpress sites - getting it right?

[allsquare]

Site A - established site 10+ years old using wordpress selling widgets

Site B - established site 6+ years old using wordpress selling blue widgets

We want to move all the content from Site B into a section on Site A specialising in blue widgets.

Then Site B will no longer exist.

Questions:
Is there a best practice way to perform this redirection?

Alongside 301 re-directs, should Google be informed in WMT via the Change of Address method even though Site A is an existing site?

 

[webgeek]

Have a look at this story on Moz.

Also some good reading here and here.

If you've got toxicity of the old domain (bad backlinks that have caused one or more penalty situations), then when you redirect old to new, instead send the old -> to a page blocked via robots.txt on the new domain which then -> redirects to the final destination on the new site.
[I'm using old/new, but that really is just site A and site B]

This intermediate pass through is what Google had recommended at one point for sanitising the links, keeping the forward for humans, but dropping any link juice/anchor rank and hence penalty scrubbing at the same time.

 

[Audrey Wright]

DO NOTE: Every migration will lead to SE traffic falling hard at first, before eventually returning back to benchmark positions. It might never return to exactly the same positions as it was.

Clean first. Clean the content, clean the links, remove all the garbage and only take the quality stuff to your domain.

While cleaning the links, make a database of all the links you have control over pointing to your B site.
Once you're done with the migration, you need to go back and manually edit these links, so they point out to the new URLs at site A.
Also, identify the top quality link, you have and if you don't have control over them, find the person who does and email them to change the links pointing to the new URLs at site A

Every content you clean will still have the URLs in all kinds of indexes, hyperlinks and what not. Choose a strategy to redirect these URLs to contextually similar pages on your B site.

Now your B site should have a clean backlink profile and an X number of quality pages.
If it's <100, I suggest you manually transfer the content from B to A. It will take a long time, but will ensure you've looked at every single piece and it's carefully and properly transferred. While doing so, edit ALL your internal linking by pointing the links to your new URL's at site A.

Redirect the B ulr's to A urls. Your homepage should probably redirect to /BlueWidgetsCategory/ sub page. It can also go to your home, but this way you will show the user exactly what they expect to see when they click a link or visit a page from your B site. (6+ y/o domain will still be visible for a good amount of time, even though it's redirecting every visit to site A, also some people will be purposely visiting site B)

In the A site you need to have to restructure your sitemap.xml instead create a sitemap-index.xml file, which should be an index of all separate sitemaps for each category (e.g. blue-widget-sitemap.xml; red-widget-sitemap.xml ; blog-sitemap.xml etc. etc.)

Here is an example from Google's site - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712?hl=en:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><sitemapindexxmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"><sitemap><loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml...2005-01-01</lastmod></sitemap></sitemapindex>
​

Go to your GWT for site A and resubmit the sitemap, also do a "fetch as google" on the /BlueWidgetsCategory/ landing page.

Make sure your robots.txt file in site A is allowing bots to crawl everything under /BlueWidgetsCategory/ so search engines can access the new pages and index them faster, as well as position them to their according places.

When you're done with the migration, try to build some new top quality links towards your /BlueWidgetsCategory/ page.

This is everything I have on first thought. I'm sure somebody will complete it after me. Also read the links from above, they're very very valuable.

 

[rhys_td]

Clean up B's backlink profile and redirect it to either A's homepage or A's inner page where "blue widgets" is going to go. I know it's standard practice, but make sure you let your mailing list know too