Merging websites

[allsquare]

At present we have:

Mainwidgetsite.com
and two offshoot sites: bluewidgetsite.com and redwidgetsite.com

The maintenance of the three sites is not cost effective so I was thinking of copying the site into a new section of mainwidgetsite.com and redirecting bluewidgetsite.com and redwidgetsite.com to these respective sections.

Any problems doings this?

 

[Edith@TerraNetwork]

Hi allsquare,

The only downside I can see is SEO as you may lose some traffic when the old pages drop off, but otherwise this should be fine, I've done this myself a few times when I closed smaller sites down.

Another option is to have a multi-shop, ie run several domains from within the same admin, this is particularly useful if you don't want to combine the sites (eg retail / wholesale).

But if all fits together, then a redirect is a simple way to go and will work well.

best regards, Edith

 

[allsquare]

I think it was just a panic that Google et al might consider this a slightly dubious activity eg if it appeared i was buying up other sites and simply redirecting them to one.

 

[Axphey]

You're actually confusing Google in terms of SERP. You may lose the traffic and there are strong chances of losing the SEO standard. With this new redirection everything would be fresh rather or from scratch you can say.

 

[ronnie7272]

As long as you 301 redirect the pages from bluewidgetsite.com and redwidgetsite.com to the correct pages on Mainwidgetsite.com you will be fine.

 

[SEOpie]

To build upon what others have said, ensure all internal pages redirect to the new URL, rather than mass redirecting to the domain. Any pages that aren't migrated across should either be redirected to a page that is a worthy replacement, or just offered as a/an (obviously customised) 404.
A change of address should also be performed on the old sites.
Plus, it might help to improve internal linking on pages that have been migrated over, to ensure all are indexed effectively/efficiently.
Best practice is to also ensure the sitemap is updated (though many will argue that it isn't strictly necessary).

 

[allsquare]

@SEOpie
There's quite a lot of text content on the sites i want to migrate, is it going to be ok to copy that content to the appropriate page?

"A change of address should also be performed on the old sites."
Do you mean within Webmaster Tools?

 

[SEOpie]

Hi,
Yes, if the content is copied across, and then 301s set up from the old URLs to the new, that should be fine.
The change of address is performed within Search Console (previously known as Webmaster Tools), yes.

Remember to ensure that if you're migrating content, you must minimize the risk of duplicate content issues; prevent indexing of the new pages while content is being migrated (it's recommended to set up a password protected test environment rather than editing the robots.txt or a meta NOINDEX tag). Also remember to thoroughly test the 301 redirects before going live.