Merging Two Unrelated Sites into a Third Site
-
We have a new client interested in possibly merging 2 sites into one under the brand of a new parent company. Here's a breakdown of the scenario.....
BrandA.com sells a variety of B2B widget-services via their online store.
BrandB.com sells a variety of B2B thing-a-majig products and services (some of them large in size) not sold through an online store. These are sold more consultatively via a sales team.
The new parent company, BrandA-B.com is considering combining the two sites under the new brand parent company domain.
The Widget-services and Thing-A-Majigs have very little similarity or purchase crossover; so just because you're interested in one doesn't make you a good candidate for the other.
We feel pretty confident that we can round-up all the necessary pages and inbound links to do proper transitioning to a new, separate third domain though we're not in agreement that this is the best course of action. Currently the individual brand sites are fairly well known in their industry and each ranks fairly well for a variety of important terms though there is room for improvement and each site has good links with the exception of the new site which has considerably fewer.
BrandA.com DA = 73 - 19 years old
BrandB.com DA = 55 - 18 years old
BrandA-B.com DA = 40 - 1 year oldOur SEO team members have opinions on what the potential outcome(s) of this would be but are wondering what the community here thinks. Will the combining of the sites cause a dilution of the topics of the two sites and hurt rankings? Will the combining of the domain authority help one set part of the business but hurt the other? What do you think? What would you do?
-
If marketing/branding feels like they want all of them to be consolidated under the brand, I would go ahead and move forward, and just be sure to cover my typical site merger bases.
From my experience, it ends up happening at some point, so you might as well take advantage of the extra press, etc. that is likely happening from the merger to get it right as soon as possible.
-
But if you had a choice to merge or not merge the sites as we have outlined here would you or wouldn't you?
-
This is a common challenge for business during/after M&As... Especially when the acquisition is to bring on a new service/product that was previously not provided. A lot will hinge on the structure of the new site, and if it creates a clear user (and crawler) experience for these two separate facets of the new business.
I'm assuming you plan to create a homepage generally addressing the services/products of the company and providing users with the choice of going from the homepage to /brandatheme/ or /brandbtheme/ ... so you clearly differentiate the topics in the site structure, and can maintain the authority to their respective sections of the new site?
A consideration could be made to build the new site first, selectively canonical pages of the old sites for a transition period, and then doing the final redirecting... just so the change can be monitored.
I typically set an expectation to of potential short term losses, but net neutral over 6 months if the migration is done well.
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
-
Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results on 100% responsive site
Has anyone experienced an issue where Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results than their Desktop site crawl on a 100% responsive website that passes all Google Mobile tests?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MFCommunications0 -
Competition site with Duplicate Name
I have a client who is in real estate and one of his competition used the same Name and Domain and added the word Toronto in front. The competition is putting similar content on the website. The competition also hijacked the Google listing since they both work in the same building. Is this going to affect the ranking our website? What negative effect will it put on our website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KaranX0 -
Google Indexing our site
We have 700 city pages on our site. We submitted to google via a https://www.samhillbands.com/sitemaps/locations.xml but they only indexed 15 so far. Yes the content is similar on all of the pages...thought on getting them to index the remaining pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
Site Not Ranking- No Reason Why
I have a client with a HUGE website who should be ranking for it's competitive keywords. No penalties, or bad links. Old domain. Not ranking for anything. Client has a huge AdWords spend and my theory is that it's not ranking organically because of the AdWords spend. I can't think of anything other reason. Anyone? Thanks. The keywords I'm trying to rank this client for aren't even competitive.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 01023450 -
Better SEO Option, 1 Site 3 Subdomains or 4 Separate Sites?
Hey Mozzers, I'm working with a client who wants to redo their web presence. They have a a main website for the umbrella and then 3 divisions which have their own website as well. My question is: Is it better to have the main site on the main domain and then have the 3 separate sites be subdomains? Or 4 different domains with a linking structure to tie them all together? To my understanding option 1 would include high traffic for 1 domain and option 2 would be building Page Authority by having 4 different sites linking to each other? My guess would be option 2, only if all 4 sites start getting relevant authority to make the links of value. But right out of the gates option 1 might be more beneficial. A little advice/clarification would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Is this site worth subscribing to?
Hi everyone is, the below site worthwhile submitting to? I see one of our competitors is on here and the article they have published has in turn be picked up by other sites. Is the financial cost worth the back link reward? https://app.prweb.com/Main.aspx?Entity=Home
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hardley10 -
How would I know if Google is showing me as two separate sites?
I work for a company that is (for example) www.neat-stuff.com, most people just type in www.neatstuff.com. I think that we are being counted as a site twice. Any suggestions as to how to know for sure? If you want to know why I am asking this here is the link http://www.seomoz.org/q/redirect-help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Optimize a Classifieds Site
Hi, I have a classifieds website and would like to optimize it. The issues/questions I have: A Classifieds site has, say, 500 cities. Is it better to create separate subdomains for each city (http://city_name.site.com) or subdirectory (http://site.com/city_name)? Now in each city, there will be say 50 categories. Now these 50 categories are common across all the cities. Hence, the layout and content will be the same with difference of latest ads from each city and name of the city and the urls pointing to each category in the relevant city. The site architecture of a classifieds site is highly prone to have major content which is not really a duplicate content. What is the best way to deal with this situation? I have been hit by Panda in April 2011 with traffic going down 50%. However, the traffic since then has been around same level. How to best handle the duplicate content penalty in case with site like a classifieds site. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ketan90