Merging domains was probably a mistake. Can it be undone?
-
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?
- Weed out thin content and stick with the merger?
- Removing all of Website B's content and the redirects to Website A?
- ??
Thanks!
- Jan
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Similar Keywords on Addon Domain
Hi all, I'm looking at setting up a second website targeting some similar keywords to my existing blog. I host the site through bluehost and am considering hosting the other website as an addon Domain. Whilst the content on both websites will be different both will target the same keywords. Does anyone know if because I'm targeting the same keys words using an addon Domain this could impact my existings site google rankings? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | thriftypence0 -
One server, two domains - robots.txt allow for one domain but not other?
Hello, I would like to create a single server with two domains pointing to it. Ex: domain1.com -> myserver.com/ domain2.com -> myserver.com/subfolder. The goal is to create two separate sites on one server. I would like the second domain ( /subfolder) to be fully indexed / SEO friendly and have the robots txt file allow search bots to crawl. However, the first domain (server root) I would like to keep non-indexed, and the robots.txt file disallowing any bots / indexing. Does anyone have any suggestions for the best way to tackle this one? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Dave1000 -
Redirect root domain to www
I've been having issues with my keyword rankings with MOZ and this is what David at M0Z asked me to do below. Does anyone have a solution to this? I'm not 100% sure what to do. Does it hurt ranking to have a domain at the root or not? Can I 301 redirect a whole site or do I have to do individual pages. "Your campaign is looking for rankings for the www version of the campaign but the URL resolves as a root domain. This would explain the discrepancy. Since there is no re-direct between the two, you can have brickmarkers.com 301 re-direct to www.site.com which will prevent you from re-creating your campaign to track the root domain. Once the re-direct is in place it will take a while for Google to show the www version in the results in which your campaign rankings will be accurate." Thanks
Technical SEO | | SeaDrive0 -
Can I canonical the same page?
I have a site where I have 500+ Page listing pages and I would like to rel=canonical them to the master page. Example: http://www.example.com//articles?p=18 OR http://www.example.com/articles?p=65 I plan on adding this to the section from of the page template so it goes to all pages - When I do this, I will also add the canonical to the page I am directing the canonical. Is this a bad thing? Or allowed?
Technical SEO | | JoshKimber0 -
Domain Switch - With lost control of original domain.
Hey all, A client finally sold a domain name after being harassed to sell for many years, without talking to us about it first. They moved the site to a new domain, and the purchasing company took over the original domain. Then they called me, wondering why the site is no longer showing up in Google. I've done some initial research, and everything I find for advice assumes that you have control over the original domain. We don't. I'm hoping someone here has some creative advice, so we don't have to start from the beginning, and/or painfully update links we've acquired. My only thought was that the new company may be kind enough to post 301's for us if we provided them.... Any thoughts / advice / life rings will be greatly appreciated! 🙂
Technical SEO | | KBK0 -
Why is there duplicates of my domain
When viewing crawl diagnostics in SEOmoz I can see both "www.website.com" and a truncated version "website.com" is this normal and why is it showing (I do not have duplicates of my site on the server)? E.g.: http://www.klinehimalaya.com/
Technical SEO | | gorillakid
http://klinehimalaya.com/0 -
How can I get unimportant pages out of Google?
Hi Guys, I have a (newbie) question, untill recently I didn't had my robot.txt written properly so Google indexed around 1900 pages of my site, but only 380 pages are real pages, the rest are all /tag/ or /comment/ pages from my blog. I now have setup the sitemap and the robot.txt properly but how can I get the other pages out of Google? Is there a trick or will it just take a little time for Google to take out the pages? Thanks! Ramon
Technical SEO | | DennisForte0 -
Sitemap with References to Second Domain
I have just discovered a client site that is serving content from a single database into two separate domains and has created xml sitemaps which contain references to both domains in an attempt to avoid being tagged for duplicate content. I always thought that a sitemap was intended to show the files inside a single domain and the idea of multiple domains in the sitemap had never occurred to me... The sites are both very large storefronts and one of them (the larger of the two) has recently seen a 50% drop in search traffic and loss of some 600 search terms from top 50 positions in Google. My first instinct is that the sitemaps should be altered to only show files within each domain, but am worried about causing further loss of traffic. Is it possible that the inclusion URLs for the second domain in the sitemap may in fact be signalling duplicate content to Search Engines? Does anyone have a definitive view of whether these sitemaps are good, bad or irrelevant?
Technical SEO | | ShaMenz0