How to handle a merge with another site
-
I own a gaming site at legendzelda.net
Recently a site zelda-temple.net wanted to merge communities and sites. We pretty much scrapped their content (a lot was articles I already had topics on), merged the user databases, and redirected the domain to mine.
What is the best seo way to redirect that domain. I tried to set up a 301 on the entire domain to gain all the backlinks that site had (A LOT) but it seems as if a lot are not being picked up by the open site explorer and other tools.
Advice?
-
Then I would do it as you have and just understand it will take a bit longer.
-
The main focus of my site is news and coverage on the most recent games.
Like
http://legendzelda.net/zelda-skyward-sword/
The other games are older and get less coverage and sadly my site was not around when some of these games came out (back to the 80's) so I am focusing on news and the most recent games. As you will see the page linked there has a better PA than some the older games as this one just came out and was the focus for quite some time.
So am not looking to boost the PA for most inner pages. Just wanting to get all the pages from that old site to go to my main page, get the news, see who I am, and hopefully become a daily reader.
-
I do not believe that will work for you the way you are hoping. As it stands, what you are doing is redirecting every page on zelda-temple to legendzelda.net, your home page. Since I don't know much about legends of Zelda (I am more of a Modern Warfare kinda guy)
I am assuming the site generates money from sponsors and that those sponsors are on various pages throughout.
If someone wants to go to a given page for say "majoras Mask", your PA there is 21 (you only have one linking root domain) whereas your homepage today is at 51.So long as you believe all will come to the homepage and stay there long enough to look at sponsors before going on, leave it as is.
If you want to enhance the site and have more people seeing individual pages (through better ranking) as opposed to the homepage, you need to change the 301 so that you are linking url to url.
Best
-
Due to the way the old site was set up that is not possible so it is not an option at this point
-
That's not the best way to do it. The method Robert outlined is better.
-
I have implemented this and it seems to be working now. Does this look like a solution that will work and if so will I start to see the links coming toward the new domain here when the linkscape update goes down next month?
RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^zelda-temple.netRewriteRule (.) http://www.zelda-temple.net/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteEngine onRewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.zelda-temple.net$RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://legendzelda.net [R=301,L]
-
I am wanting to have it where it will be
to newsite.com/
oldsite/forums
to
Every page on old site to index of new site.
I have tried a variety of 301s and rewrites with no success.
And this merger actually went down back in late October and i had the domain redirecting to my new one and been checking for updates to the linkscape since then and havent seen anything.
-
if your 301 is domain to domain it will not work or will take forever. You need to set up the 301 in the .htaccess file and do it url to url. So, if you had zelda-temple.net/xyz/ and on your site you had othertemple.com/xyz you would 301 the zelda/xyz to yoursurl/xyz.
This way the link juice will be transferred around 90%
Typically we see as much as 95% transferred over several months.
As to showing in OSE, due to the timing of the crawls you will not see changes for 5 to 7 weeks and then monthly thereafter. No need to watch that daily. The schedule for the crawl is here: http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape-Schedule
Hope this helps
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
-
Our client's site was owned by former employee who took over the site. What should be done? Is there a way to preserve all the SEO work?
A client had a member of the team leave on bad terms. This wasn't something that was conveyed to us at all, but recently it came up when the distraught former employee took control of the domain and locked everyone out. At first, this was assumed to be a hack, but eventually it was revealed that one of the company starters who unhappily left the team owned the domain all along and is now holding it hostage. Here's the breakdown: -Every page aside from the homepage is now gone and serving a 404 response code -The site is out of our control -The former employee is asking for a $1 million ransom to sell the domain back -The homepage is a "countdown clock" that isn't actively counting down, but claims that something exciting is happening in 3 days and lists a contact email. The question is how we can save the client's traffic through all this turmoil. Whether buying a similar domain and starting from square one and hoping we can later redirect the old site's pages after getting it back. Or maybe we have a legal claim here that we do not see even though the individual is now the owner of the site. Perhaps there's a way to redirect the now defunct pages to a new site somehow? Any ideas are greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Awful ranking after site redesign
Hello everyone, I have a situation here and I’d like to have your opinion about it. I am working on a site which has been recently redesigned from scratch: in a nutshell, as soon as the new site went live their rankings dropped and, of course, so did their visitors and so on.. The guys who redesigned the site didn’t do any 301 redirect whatsoever, so now the old pages are just 404s and blocked by robots. My question is: if they 301 redirect now, do you think it would be possible they could get their rankings back? One more thing: when they launched the new site, the indexed pages basically doubled overnight; there were 700 and now there are 1400. Do you think this could affect their ranking as well? Thank you for you insights 🙂 Elio
Technical SEO | | Eyah0 -
Meta Description Being Picked up from another site!?
Hi, when we search for a phrase (which is the most searched for phrase for our company) the meta description which is displayed isnt the one we set, and it hasnt picked it up from any text on the page. The description is incorrect, it says we have an office in a city that we dont, and it just isnt a very good description generally. What has been suggested to us by our website developers is that the description is being picked up by google from a website which lists companies details. The description which is displayed on that website, is the same as the description which is shown for our company in the search results. But is it possible for Google to ignore the meta description which is set in our homepage and the other text on the home page, and pickup the text from another website and use it as our description? Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | danieldunn100 -
Google Site Search
I'm considering to implement google site search bar into my site.
Technical SEO | | JonsonSwartz
I think I probably choose the version without the ads (I'll pay for it). does anyone use Google Site Search and can tell if it's a good thing? does it affects in any way on seo? thank you0 -
One site per location or all under and umbrella site?
I am working on a project where we are re-branding lots (100+) existing local business under one national brand. I am wondering what we should do with their existing websites, they are generally fairly poor and will need re-designing to match the new brand but may have some residual links? 301 redirect the URL to the national site, e.g. nationalsite.com/localbusinessA? If so what should I look out for? Do I need to specifically redirect any pages that have links to them to the same pages on the new site? Or should I give them a new standalone website that they link back to the national brand site? More than likely this will be hosted on the same server and CMS as the main site just the URL will remain Do I need to make sure that any old URL's that had links to them are 301'd to the new pages? Many thanks for you advice.
Technical SEO | | BadgerToo0 -
Site Structure Still Old
Ok after my first SEO report from seomoz I re-structured one of my sites. I basically split it into two different sites. I did this way before it was re-crawled on 5/1 and the results still show pages that no longer exist on that domain. What is causing this (user error I am sure but I just need to know what I can do to fix it).
Technical SEO | | bobbabuoy0 -
Site problem
I moved a site earlier on in the year to a better server www.keyrs.co.uk, my main keywords being equity release - equity release calculator and equity release schemes. Since this happened the ranking have gone down and the schemes and calculator terms and have hit positions 7-8 when they were 2-3. basically my question is open to all, i am looking to see what the problem is with these pages as it is driving me nuts. All tools on SEO moz show the pages are doing well, however i must be missing something. Mike
Technical SEO | | TomBarker820 -
Impact of 401s on Site Rankings
Will having 401s on a site negatively impact rankings? (e.g. 401s thrown from a social media sharing icon)
Technical SEO | | Christy-Correll0