Best Way to Consolidate Domains?
-
Hello,
My company has four websites in the same vertical and we're planning to integrate them all on our main company site.
So instead of www.siteone.com, www.sitetwo.com, www.sitethree.com, etc.
It would be www.branddomain.com/site-one, www.branddomain.com/site-two, etc.
I have a few questions...
Should we redirect the old domains to the new directories or leave the old domains and stop updating them with new content... Then have the old content, links, etc. 301 to the same content on the new site?
Should we literally move all of the content to the new directories?
Any tips are appreciated. It's probably pretty obvious that I don't have a ton of technical skills... my development team will be doing the heavy lifting. I just want to be sure we do this correctly from an SEO perspective!
Thanks for the help, please let me know if I can clarify anything.
E
-
Ok, thanks again. BIG HELP!!
-
Leave the site up. It won't show because of redirects. No new content.
-
Robert, thanks. That definitely answers my question. The biggest thing was whether or not users can access rootdomain.com or if that gets redirected to the new directory as well.
If I understand your answer, you're saying leave the root domain or index page, etc. up there, redirect the content to the new directories and just stop updating the old domain... Right?
Thanks!
-
Ok, thanks for the answer...
Do you think I should 301 the root domains or just 301 the content pages?
-
We had a similar approach and the decision to merge all domains into one was to minimize link building efforts .
After all the domains were 301 redirected to the new one, the new domain received so much PR equity that the rankings skyrocketed. So yes, my suggestion is to 301 redirect all the domains to the new one especially if siteone.com, sitetwo.com etc have some authority. It will work for sure.
Should we literally move all of the content to the new directories?
** If technically that's ok then yes. by ok I mean easy to do. Also old domains should just be 301 redirected to the new appropriate pages from the new domain.
It#s just my opinion but again we had a similar approach even if from different reasons and it worked like a charm.
-
essdee
I would suggest that you 301 each url from each of the current domains to a url on the new domain that is relevant to that domain. So, if on SiteOne.com and Sitetwo.com you have pages regarding /muffin-making/ and on the BrandSite.com you have muffin-construction. 301 SiteOne.com/muffin-making to BrandSite.com/muffin-construction and 301 SiteTwo.com/muffin-making to BrandSite.com/muffin-construction.
If you had some pages that were irrelevant in terms of links or no directory similar, etc. you could redirect to homepage or other relevant page. In case I misunderstood you, when you do 301's, you leave the old sites up but add no new content.
Remember you are doing this url to url in the .htaccess file of each.
Hope it 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
-
Best way to go about merging 2 sites with significant search volume?
Hi everyone! A client of ours ('Company A') recently acquired another company ('Company B') - both brands carry weight within their industry. Company A's brand name currently registers over 6,500 searches per month, while Company B's brand name draws about 2,500 searches per month. While Company B is smaller, their search volume isn't insignificant. The powers that be plan to discontinue Company B's site at an unspecified date in the future, but it's on the backburner. We'd obviously like to transfer as much of their current ranking as possible, but we also don't want to confuse users. There's additional search volume for term variations such as 'Company B jobs' & 'Company B locations' that we'd like to capture for as long as there's still volume there. Would a microsite with Company B's look & feel (to make it easier to house pages built to capture careers/locations searches) justify its inherent cost, or would it be just as valuable to build a series of landing pages on Company A's site? (Obviously assuming that valid redirects would be in place once Company B's site is taken down.) Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wilcoxcm0 -
Putting my content under domain.com/content, or under related categories: domain.com/bikes/content ?
Hello This questions plays on what Joe Hall talked about during this years' MozCon: Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing. My Case:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
So.. we're working out guidelines and templates for a costumer (sporting goods store) on how to publish content (articles, videos, guides) on their category pages, product pages, and other pages. At this moment I have 2 choices:
1. Use a url-structure/information architecture where all the content is placed in one subfolder, for example domain.com/content. Although it's placed here, there's gonna be extensive internal linking from /content to the related category pages, so the content about bikes (even if it's placed under domain.com/bikes) will be just as visible on the pages related to bikes. 2. Place the content about bikes on a subdirectory under the bike category, **for example domain.com/bikes/content. ** The UX/interface for these two scenarios will be identical, but the directories/folder-hierarchy/url structure will be different. According to Joe Hall, the latter scenario will build up more topical authority and relevance towards the category/topic, and should be the overall most ideal setup. Any thoughts on which of the two solutions is the most ideal? PS: There is one critical caveat her: my costumer uses many url-slugs subdirectories for their categories, for example domain.com/activity/summer/bikes/, which means the content in the first scenario will be 4 steps away from the home page. Is this gonna be a problem? Looking forward to your thoughts 🙂 Sigurd, INEVO0 -
Domain Forwarding - SEO Impacts?
I have a site that has been active for years - thinkbiglearnsmart.com. Awhile ago I had purchased about 50 domain names that were relevant to my company. I still have those urls and would like to use them to point to different pages on my site - just because they have good key words in the URLs. For example - one is dreamweavertrainingclassesonlinelive.com. Currently they are all redirecting to my homepage. A. is that hurting me? B. I would like to redirect to the more relevant page. ie the page dedicated to Dreamweaver training (http://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/dreamweaver-creative-cloud-training-course/ ) Will this hurt my Dreamweaver keyword for example because there is already a 301 redirect on that page from a very old Dreamweaver link which was something like thinkbiglearnsmart.com/dreamweaver C. On my hosting account where I can select where the URL forwards to - it has an option for "Location forwarding" and "Frame forwarding" - currently they are set to Frame forwarding - which one is best? Any help is much appreciated!!! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webbmason0 -
What is the best way to get anchor text cloud in line?
So I am working on a website, and it has been doing seo with keyword links for a a few years. The first branded terms comes in a 7% in 10th in the list on Ahefs. The keyword terms are upwards of 14%. What is the best way to get this back in line? It would take several months to build keyword branded terms to make any difference - but it is doable. I could try link removal, but less than 10% seem to actually get removed -- which won't make a difference. The disavow file doesn't really seem to do anything either. What are your suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
Merging Domains
Up until last week, we had separate domains for each of our 3 products. We've now merged two products to sit under one URL. The merge coincided with a CMS upgrade which effectively killed all of our old URLs save for the homepage. Is it best for me to 301 the old homepage to it's new place, as well as the rest of the old site's top pages to according pages on the new site? Or is there a better solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | taylor.craig0 -
Best way to set up anchor text on parked pages?
Our company is no longer offering a series of products, much to the disappointment of our SEO team since we've spent a long time building up the pages and getting them ranked organically. The pages all have decent page rank and in some cases rank #1 for the primary keyword. We have a sister company that we acquired a year ago and they still offer these products on their website. They are a completely separate company with their own website which existed long before we acquired them and we have nothing to do with their website. Our team has proposed that rather than take down the URLs on our site for the products we no longer offer, to put a message saying something like "sorry we don't offer this anymore but you may be interested in this.." and then link to our sister company with anchor text so that they can get some benefit from our SEO efforts if we can't. The question/issue is how should we do that since there will be a lot of pages from the same domain, about 20 pages, all linking to a few pages on a different domain. Should the anchor text be varied unbranded or branded? On the one hand I think if we change up the anchor text used to link to another page many times from a single domain that looks strange and transparent to google. On the other hand unbranded text would be the better descriptor for users since we are deep linking to the product not the homepage of the other site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edu-SEO0 -
301 of EDM domains
If I buy a keyword EDM domain and 301 redirect it to my site, will I rank better for that keyword?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | creaturmedia0 -
Domains merging
Hi everyone, The company I work for has two domains, one for the english version of the website and another one for the french version. Example: www.digitalmusic.com (in english) www.musiquedigitale.com (in french) (these are examples***) I would like to know if on SEO standpoint it would be better to only have one domain so all of the links link to the same domain. Would it increase the domain authority and our rankings ? We will then have: www.digitalmusic.com/fr/page1 for pages in french www.digitalmusic.com/en/page1 for pages in english with all the 301 redirects required... Thank you in advance for your answers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maxxum0