Splitting one Website into 2 Different New Websites with 301 redirects, help?

[Hyrule]

Here's the deal. My website stbands.com does fairly well. The only issue it is facing a long term branding crisis. It sells custom products and sporting goods. We decided that we want to make a sporting goods website for the retail stuff and then a custom site only focusing on the custom stuff. One website transformed and broken into 2 new ones, with two new brand names.

The way we are thinking about doing this is doing a lot of 301 redirects, but what do we do with the homepage (stbands.com) and what is the best practice to make sure we don't lose traffic to the categories, etc.? Which new website do we 301 the homepage to?

It's rough because for some keywords we rank 3 or 4 times on the first page. Scary times, but something must be done for the long term. Any advise is greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance. We are set for a busy next few months

[AdamThompson]

I'd go for quality over quantity. Some guest blogs, perhaps, or maybe links from vendor or partner websites. I'd be very careful to use a natural mix of anchor text, too. Don't want to give Google any reason at all to be suspicious.

[Hyrule]

Adam,

I am highly considering 301-ing the homepage to our main source of revenue and because it actually ranks along with our other pages. If we do this i am guessing we'd be taking more of a hit on our other new website, which i am willing to do.

This sounds like the best option to keep revenue a float while we build these brands back up. Assuming I will be launching everything in August, how many links to recommend I build to each domain?

Thanks,

Paul

[Matthew_Edgar]

Hi Paul,

I went through a very similar situation at the end of last year with a client of mine. That client's business broke apart into two other companies. It was scary because that old company's website had a lot of authority, ranked for many, many terms (long tail and head terms).

Adam's recommendation of getting links to the new domains is critical. In the case of my client, one of the new websites did have a few links (a dozen or so) while the other website had no links. The website without links did not perform as well. I would recommend you start that process now, even if those links point to a "coming soon" type home page on those new domains.

For the home page, we created a splash page that offered visitors a choice of going to one company or the other. We did put deeper links into both sites on this page, though that was more a usability consideration. I wouldn't redirect the home page to either website, unless there is a clear usability case to be made for doing so. That way the splash page acts a communication to users and Google about the new direction of the website.

Also, so that you know...Google still has that page indexed but after the first 2-3 months, that page started to lose rankings and traffic from search. I'm not sure if it lost rankings because of it being a splash page or because we started changing links (I suspect the links though the change in the content of the home page certainly played a role). Either way, that was the desired intention; you don't want the splash page to rank.

All the other pages on the site were 301 redirected to the appropriate pages of the new websites. We had no troubles redirecting to multiple domains. Adam is right though that this may be seen as spammy so be careful with this. We started out in small batches of pages as a test before going full on into the redirects. If you can, I'd start with that. Measure, test, repeat with another small batch, etc.

Finally, I will tell you that we did see a drop in rankings/traffic to the two new websites (that is, the total Google and Bing activity for the two sites was less than where we had been with the old website). We are now at the seven month mark and starting to regain steam. Not quite where it was this time last year, but I am seeing gains. SO, make sure that you brace for impact and plan for a slowdown when you do this.

I hope I was able to help you out. Thanks,
Matthew

[AdamThompson]

A few suggestions:

• Anything you can do to get the new domains indexed and a few links built to them well in advance of the redirect might be a good idea. I've never had it happen myself, but I've heard of a few cases of lost rankings when redirecting to a fresh domain.
• Once you do the redirects, try to get your most important links changed to the new domain. (Redirects to lose some link juice and/or decay over time.)
• Make sure you are redirecting each page on the old site to the most relevant page on the new site.
• I've never redirected every single URL on one domain to pages on two other domains. You might want to ask around to see if Google might frown upon that (I can imagine this is a tactic spammers might try to use to pass link juice to a bunch of domains). I'm sure someone else has done this and could advise.
• Any chance of keeping your current domain for one of the two sites?

I can think of a few options for the homepage:

• Don't redirect it. Create a splash page with a "which do you want" option and links to both domains.
• Redirect it to the domain that is most important to you.
• Redirect it to the domain that will be most relevant to the highest number of users.
• Redirect it to the domain that will be most relevant to the keywords the homepage currently ranks for.

Hope this helps!