Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
SEO Considerations for merging two brand website into one
-
Hello fellow Mozzers,
We have two websites for two similar brands at my place of employment, the two brands currently serve slighly different products but could be held quite happily under one branded site. As part of a potential group merger into one sole brand, we will have to create one joined up website which will then feature all our products. The newly merged site will also have more scope to allow us to expand our product range where as currently one brand is kind of specific to a particular market due to its name.
So as part of the Merge, I have to consider the potential implications for our search traffic, as this is an integral part of our business.
Brand A - older, more authorative, great content, good organic positions - top 10 for pretty much all terms we favour.
Brand B - younger, but has more marketing scope due to name, still good site and lots of content.
Unfortunately Brand B has more in terms of potential lifespan, but is currently the less authorative of the two sites we run. it has lower DA and PR according to my Moz Analytics, a lower number of quality links and less content. In order to give the Brand B website the boost that is needed and in effect replace Brand A in the serps which has great organic positions, I need to make sure all bases are ticked for an action plan.
So far this is what I have.
- Transfer all exisiting Brand A web pages to Brand B website.
- Rel canonical all Brand A pages to now point to Brand B websites new pages.
- 301 redirect all pages on Brand A to Brand B during the transfer.
- Once 301 redirects are in place then request external sites to actually repoint to Brand B website for any links.
- Update xml Sitemaps
- Update any content that mentions Brand B to now be Brand A.
- resubmit sitemaps to Webmaster tools
- Update all social profiles
- Update all local search profiles and listings
- Update all review sites with new brand name / merge any with both brands
On a supplementary note for customer information, looking to also keep the older Brand A Home page up for a short time to help people understand the transition rather than a complete redirect which to our demographic could confuse and alienate people. Will also look to send a mass email to roughly 400K people informing them of the move abd how it affects them.
I have no doubt there will be some glaringly obvious additions, any further advice would be much appreciated.
Hope you are all well.
Tim
-
hi Tim,
if you have anything that gets a lot of traffic you could move that to the new site like moz.com/rand/ this would help get the crawlers going. I will give you a full crawl and also I am sorry I just Getting back to you.
I am so sorry I did not mean to take this on and I will check your private message I've been so busy.
This is something to hold onto download it and keep it fill it out keep it somewhere safe
http://netdna.copyblogger.com/documents/WordPress-Emergency-Checklist.pdf
SEO gadget change their name recently to builtvisible and made awesome post about how to keep link juice
http://builtvisible.com/surviving-seo-site-migration/
http://builtvisible.com/domain-migration/
http://builtvisible.com/change-of-address/
https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/7-technical-seo-wins-for-web-developers/
https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/a-wordpress-theme-change-seo-checklist/
Sean Anderson at hobo SEO to let the name fool you has a great article
http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/how-to-change-domain-names-keep-your-rankings-in-google/
http://moz.com/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains
I will reply and I strongly recommend running screaming frog SEO spider or deep crawl in fact I will go into your private message right now and start a deep crawl on your site. This will give you everything. http://deepcrawl.co.uk I will also of course run screaming frog and send you the archives.
Sorry it took so long to respond,
Tom
-
Are there any other considerations I may be missing when moving website?
-
These are great links and tips Thomas.
I particularly liked the infographic from Aleydasolis.
Thanks for the help!
-
Thank you Thomas, I am glad it was understandable, I have a habit of waffling on a bit when trying to explain things
What is your username so I can DM you the two domains privately.
Cheers in advance Tim.
-
Hi Tim,
I think you did a great job of writing everything out. Would you mind sharing your URL's with me via private message if you are uncomfortable sharing it here?
I would be very hesitant to tell you to merge sites without knowing what type of content they have.
However having said that Granger.com is a good example of a site that sells just about everything. The only common theme is industrial products. But those range so vastly that you can understand what I mean.
as far as the best way to do it take the domain with the most authority and keep that domain 301 redirect the other domain page by page to it.
Here is some information
- http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-keep-old-url-juice-during-site-switch
- http://moz.com/community/q/301-redirect-subdirectory-to-new-domain
- http://moz.com/community/q/which-page-should-i-301-redirect-to-the-other
let me know if this is enough information I'd be happy to field any questions.
All the best,
Thomas
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
-
SEO on dynamic website
Hi. I am hoping you can advise. I have a client in one of my training groups and their site is a golf booking engine where all pages are dynamically created based on parameters used in their website search. They want to know what is the best thing to do for SEO. They have some landing pages that Google can see but there is only a small bit of text at the top and the rest of the page is dynamically created. I have advised that they should create landing pages for each of their locations and clubs and use canonicals to handle what Google indexes.Is this the right advice or should they noindex? Thanks S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bedynamic0 -
Help! The website ranks fine but one of my web pages simply won't rank on Google!!!
One of our web pages will not rank on Google. The website as a whole ranks fine except just one section...We have tested and it looks fine...Google can crawl the page no problem. There are no spurious redirects in place. The content is fine. There is no duplicate page content issue. The page has a dozen product images (photos) but the load time of the page is absolutely fine. We have the submitted the page via webmaster and its fine. It gets listed but then a few hours later disappears!!! The site has not been penalised as we get good rankings with other pages. Can anyone help? Know about this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
We have two different websites with the same products and information, will that hurt our rankings?
We have two different domains, one for the UK and the other for the US, they have the exact same products, categories and information. (the information is almost the same in 400 products) We know that Google could recognize that as duplicate content, but will that actually hurt our rankings in both sites? Is it better if we create two completely different versions of the content on those pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoitWiser0 -
Splitting one Website into 2 Different New Websites with 301 redirects, help?
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 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hyrule0 -
Domain expiration and seo
My domain name is free with my service with yahoo but it expires every year and gets extended automatically as I continue service, how does this impact my seo efforts? I've heard that the search engines prefer sites to expire in 3 years or more? Is this a fact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
What should I cover in a SEO proposal ?
What should I cover in a SEO proposal? Is there any sample SEO Proposal template in SEOMoz?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kashyaplakkad1 -
Multiple stores & domains vs. One unified store (SEO pros / cons for E-Commerce)
Our company runs a number of individual online shops, specialised in particular products but all in the same genre of goods overall, with a specific and relevant domain name for each shop. At the moment the sites are separate, and not interlinked, i.e. Completely separate brands. An analogy could be something like clothing accessories (we are not in the clothing business): scarves.com, and silkties.com (our field is more niche than this) We are about to launch a related site, (e.g. handbags.com), in the same field again but without precisely overlapping products. We will produce this site on a newer, more flexible e-commerce platform, so now is a good time to consider whether we want to place all our sites together with one e-commerce system on the backend. Essentially, we need to know what the pros and cons would be of the various options facing us and how the SEO ranking is affected by the three possibilities. Option 1: continue with separate sites each with its own domains. Option 2: have multiple sites, each on their own domain, but on the same ecommerce system and visible linked together for the customer (with unified checkout) – on the top of each site could be a menu bar linking to each site: [Scarves.com] – [SilkTies.com] – [Handbags.com] The main question here is whether the multiple domains are mutually beneficial, particularly considerding how close to target keywords the individual domains are. If mutually benefitial, how does it compare to option 3: Option 3: Having recently acquired a domain name (e.g. accessories.com) which would cover the whole category together, we are presented with a third option: making one site selling all of these products in different categories. Our main concern here would be losing the ability to specifically target marketing, and losing the benefit of the domains with the key words in for what people are more likely to be searching for (e.g. 'silk tie') rather than 'accessories.' Is it worth taking the hit on losing these specific targeted domain names for the advantage of increased combined inbound links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colage0 -
Is DOCTYPE important for SEO?
Hello fellow Mozzers. I am just having a brief look at a potential clients website before speaking to them tomorrow and whilst looking at the source I noticed that they don't appear to have a clear definition for their Doctype. All the have at the top of each page is I have to admit that Doctypes aren't my strong point but I know that they are normally slightly more descriptive than this. Can this have any effect on rankings? or is this just an issue for W3C validation? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis0