Two sites into one
-
I have two sites owned by one client, he wants to merge them into one keeping one website, but which one? I've been using the Moz Pro to look at the stats for both sites; page authority, inbound links etc, but they're both fairly close in results. The client wants to know what would be the best course to take with these two sites, what site should he keep and which should he merge? Any advice?
-
I'd look at which has the most traffic then and which makes them the most money.
The primary site will need to cater for the people who would have landed on the secondary site equally as well as if they had landed direct onto the secondary site though.You don't want to put off people who are already happily using the secondary site.
-
This is a complex question that requires lots of study before giving an answer.
As a generalization, consider these two things...
-
If these two sites have very different content and very different link profiles then merging them will probably be a good idea. But, if they have a lot of similar content and similar link profiles then merging them could result in a reduction in total traffic.
-
Usually it is best to merge the weaker site into the stronger site. Usually.
I have sites that I could merge but I don't do it because I am confident that is much more profitable to run them separately.
Your sites might have two different biz models. One could be very visible and sell lots of merchandise at MSRP and high profit. The other might be a discount site that ranks deeper in the SERPs and gets sales from the people who dig hard to find bargains. This allows you to play both games.
In B&M, it is possible to run two toy stores in the same town. Although they compete with one another they are two stores out of five instead of one store out of four. Remember there are only ten organic positions on the first page of google and if you hold two at the top that is awesome.
-
-
Hi Robert. There's an excellent blog post on this very process here: http://moz.com/blog/2-become-1-merging-two-domains-made-us-an-seo-killing. Some of the steps they took:
- Identifying which site had the best branding.
- Considering which site has better engagement.
- Addressing which site seemed to have any negative issues.
After that it became pretty clear which to merge into which. A good read! Check out the blog for the full details. Cheers!
-
Hi,
Thanks for the prompt reply.
They do sell the same product but in slightly different geographic locations. They basically don't want to maintain two sites when they both more or less say the same thing and see the same product range.
-
Hi,
Do they both do/sell the same thing?
Which one has most visits?
Why do they want to merge them?
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 Rankings Ebbs and Flows on Ecommerce Site - Normal?
Hey everyone, I should start by saying I'm very new to SEO (I'm actually just a copywriter that's taken on this role at an agency), so I apologize if I'm using some common terms incorrectly or if there's a lack of information. I've been optimizing my first ecommerce website (clothing company), and things were going very well last year. Strong surges in organic traffic, peaking in the summer. There was a drop before the holidays when the client dumped a ton of new product pages that weren't optimized. After optimizing the pages, the traffic went back up to its summer levels. Now, there's about a 10% drop in organic traffic since earlier this year, and a loss of just over 20% of keywords the site was originally ranking for. There's no sharp drop in the Analytics, but a steady decline. To give a better idea, the site was ranking for 5,270 keywords in February; it's dropped to 3,772 keywords in April. According to SEMRush, almost all the dropped keywords are the lower volume ones, maybe indicating long tail keywords? I'm really not sure what the cause of the drop is, as I've been following (I think) best on-page practices, which seems to have yielded results last year. One thing I should mention is the client has a unique product page for each variant of one product (so the same shirt will have 10 of the same pages, the only difference being the colour). Could Google be penalizing the site for duplicate content? It was fine last year though with that same site structure; I'm not sure how long it would take for Google to penalize a site for that. Sorry for the wall of text. I'd really appreciate any insight into this. Thanks Moz community!
On-Page Optimization | | EdenPrez3 -
When does updating site content affect SERPS?
Can any of you shine a light as to when updating content on a website had any effect on its 'general' placement in the search engines? I appreciate that for an online newspaper, it must be important, but has anyone noticed from theirs or a client's site that by not uploading i.e. product descriptions or articles in general, that their site has taken a hit?
On-Page Optimization | | SDavis110 -
Word Count - Content site vs ecommerce site
Hi there, what are your thoughts on word count for a content site vs. an ecommerce site. A lot of content sites have no problem pushing out 500+ words per page, which for me is a decent amount to help you get traction. However on ecommerce sites, a lot of the time the product description only needs to be sub-100 words and the total word count on the page comes in at under 300 words, a lot of that could be considered duplicate. So what are your views? Do ecommerce sites still need to have a high word count on the product description page to rank better?
On-Page Optimization | | Bee1590 -
Problem with getting a site to rank at all
We pushed this Word Press site live about a month ago www.primedraftarchitecture.com. Since then we've been adding regular content, blog posts 3 times a week with social posts on facebook, twitter, G+ and LinkedIn. We also submitted via Moz Local about 3 weeks ago. Yext about two weeks ago and have been adding about 5 listings to small local directories a week. Webmaster tools shows that the site map is valid and the pages of the site are getting indexed and it shows links from 7 sites, mostly directories. I'm just not seeing the site ranking for anything. We're getting zero organic traffic. I though we did a good job not over optimizing the pages. I'm just stymied trying to figure out what's wrong. Usually we push a site live and see at least some low rankings after just a couple of weeks. Can anyone see anything that looks bad or where we've gone wrong?
On-Page Optimization | | DonaldS0 -
Is a site map necessary or recommended?
We have a website that has been up for the past 4 years without a site map. Google is indexing it. Do we need a site map? Do you recommend we create one and submit it to goggle and bing? The site is www.logobids.com Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | IsaacH0 -
Site Downtime - Will pages be reindexed?
I recently had site downtime of about 10 days for a site I'm working on which is about 6 months old. There were naturally many page not found errors in webmaster tools as google had tried to crawl the site during the downtime but I've noticed that google has now dropped some of the pages. Are they likely to be reindexed? Google has crawled some of my pages today but as yet the ones that have been dropped from the index haven't reappeared. (the site has been live again for a week). Should they reappear when the pages are next crawled?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Break-up content into individual pages or keep on one page
I am working on a dental website. Under menu item "services" lists everything he does like.. Athletic Sports Guards
On-Page Optimization | | Czubmeister
An athletic sports guard is a resilient plastic appliance that is worn to protect the teeth and gum tissues by absorbing the forces generated by traumatic blows during sports or other activities. Digital X-Rays We use state of the art digital x-rays and digital cameras to help with an accurate diagnosis of any concerns. Digital Imaging On initial visits, and recall visits, we take a series of digital photographs to aid us in diagnosis as well as to give you a close-up view of your mouth and any oral conditions. Smile Makeovers
We offer a number of different options including bleaching, bonding, porcelain veeners, and in some cases, implants and/or orthodontic care is utilized in our smile makeover planning. Nitrous oxide for your Comfort Would it be better to break these services up into individual pages? I was thinking I would because then I could add more pictures and expand on the topic and try to get an "A" grade on each page. I'm not sure how I could rank a page if I have 35 services listed on the page. That would be an awfully big H1! Suggestions?0 -
One site with one product or multi product website
Lets suppose that i have 10 NICHE products under me. Should i make one site for each product or one site overall. If i make 1 site for each product i get several advantages Domain name has keyword Title tags etc will be dedicated to one keyword only. Disavantage - Backlinking for each domain will become tougher. Advantage of one site onl Good management Seo / backlinks becomes easier Blogging to attract traffic becomes easier Can target a lot of keywords through business blogging Disadvantages Can become messy with unimportant keywords gaining importance. SO WHAT DO YOU THINK??? One site per product or One site for all products?
On-Page Optimization | | hith2340