Migrating micro site into existing website
-
My company is planning to migrate an existing (ecommerce) micro site - which sits on its own domain - into their main ecommerce site. This means that the content will be moved from www.microdomain.co.uk to www.maindomain.com/category. Some products already exist on the main domain.
The micro site is fairly small with just over 400 pages - I am planning to map each URL to the new URL (exact corresponding page) and create 301 redirects for each. Where any additional content does not exist yet on the existing main domain, we will create it and 301 redirect to it.
The micro site currently ranks fairly well for some keywords - being such a specialised micro site, (some of) the keywords also form part of the domain name, however, they won't on the main page although they may form part of the URL (category).
As an example (using a made up URL), our micro site www.bread-sticks.co.uk ranks on page 1 for the keyword bread sticks - we don't just sell bread sticks on www.bread-sticks.co.uk but also rolls and bread though, bread sticks is one category of very closely related categories. Say our main domain is www.supermarket.co.uk (selling a wide range of food / drink products. The micro site will be moving to www.supermarket.co.uk/baked-products/ - which is a category. Within that category, there are sub categories, i.e. bread sticks, rolls and bread which will sit under www.supermarket.co.uk/bread-sticks/ etc.
What would be the best way for ensuring that our main domain would take over the rankings from our micro site, given that it will be sitting on our main domain as a category (one of many)? Can we expect www.supermarket.co.uk/baked-products/ or www.supermarket.co.uk/bread-sticks/ to replace www.bread-sticks.co.uk in the rankings simply by 301 redirecting?
Thanks for your help!
-
Thanks, great to hear of someone else's experience with a similar issue. Glad to hear your rankings mostly improved where you had a corresponding page on the main website. Makes me hopeful that the same will be the case for us.
-
Thanks, good point to keep in mind re. brand mentions etc. I will have a little dig around GA and SC to see where exactly our organic traffic for the micro site comes from to see how much we can expect to lose due to navigational domain queries etc.
-
Well, i had a problematic case in my previous position where we had a main/big niche site ranking nicely to many sub-niches. lets call the niche "xxx" and sub niches "yyy xxx" , "aaa xxx" etc..
To cut down on maintenance we have decided to migrate all 5 sub-niche (micro) sites which all had 1st page rankings for the majority of their respective keywords. Similar to your case, the main and niche sites the had same categories and sub pages.
We chose one domain to see if everything goes smoothly, we have done the URL mapping while keeping URL renaming to minimal on the main site.
Almost on every single page the content on the main site was better, indepth and fresh.
It was a hard debate, but after some trial and error we decided to go with minimal changes to the main site.
Our keywords for the merged pages mostly got better rankings (however we saw some fluctuations like -20, +10 etc for a while.. and all got stable after 2-3 weeks).
For pages that didnt existed on the main site, after the redirections in most cases our losses were between 3-10 rankings. Some of them we managed to recover with regular SEO efforts and some are still moving randomly between spots/pages..go figure
-
Thanks for your reply, Yossi.
I think I should clarify that it's not just the categories that are already pre-existing but also (most of) the products. They are currently offered both through the main website and the micro site. I only recently joined the company - as far as I know they did try to reword the product descriptions to avoid duplicate content issues, however, I will need to look into how much they actually differ.
We want to retire the micro site, however, for these specific search terms related to what we sell on the micro site, the micro site does tend to rank better. So I suppose we would want to keep the copy from the microsite if possible?
In terms of DA, our main website is slightly better than the microsite, but both are very low - 18 vs. 12. I was told they never did any active link building and I cannot find a lot of links apart from our own websites through tools like OSE.
I have created a list of all existing URLs using Screaming Frog but that is a good point about using a few other tools to verify that my list is as complete as possible.
-
If you move the content and redirect the pages then you get new pages into the SERPs and get the value of redirected links.
What you don't get are things like brand mentions, domain type-ins, navigational domain queries, visitor behavior, SERP CTR, and more. The more mature the website the more valuable these other assets might be. Some of these assets will evaporate with the move, some will be reset to zero and others might be inherited.
All you can hope for is to do what you can to conserve these things.
-
Hi
Well it is a practice done often, but do not expect to get the same rankings as you had with the micro-domain, you will see some drops. Some will gain their rankings back and others will need SEO push. The time it takes depends on many factors such as domain authority, site freshness etc..
Whenever i go and merge domains or incorporate them, i try to find the best user-friendly category architecture. First it should make sense to the user (how everything is lined up) and than to google.
IMO, if all the redirections are done correctly, the only problem that you might have is with the pre-existing categories. I would double and triple check all URLs, run extensive crawls on the site with Moz Crawl (limited no# of URLS though.. ) DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog etc. and look into the URLs. Its amazing how one program cant find some URLs and others do.. You will want to avoid duplicate content issues
Of course i don't even mention how closely you need to monitor everything.. I would do a list of the most important URLs to be transferred, and closely monitor them. Also i always suggest to go with very minimal content changes(also meta changes to minimal).. keeping it as close as to original and only then, after everything is good and healthy, i would go and start making improvements on the content..
I know how much time consuming robotic job it is
so good luck
P.S.: Also it's a good and common paractice to go ahead and contact site owners for the relevant good and natural backlinks that you have gathered over time..
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
-
Recently migrated to https version of volusion site. 301 redirect link chain question
I recently migrated to a https version of a volusion site. They have some type of internal 301 redirect method to accommodate for the entire site. I have also used the 301 redirect manager to redirect categories and pages which I have changed. The question is if I have changed a page internally in the redirect manager from say source. /bluewidget to say. target. /superbluewidget is it wiser or even possible to do it this way to reduce the redirect chain from 3 to 2 steps source. /bluewidget to. target https://www.example/superbluewidget can a relative link be targeted to a full url to reduce steps in a 301 redirect link chain. Thanks
Technical SEO | | mrkingsley0 -
White listing a site
A new clients site is blocked by a lot of Firewalls. And I can't work out why, the content is family friendly they sell nursery equipment. I've run it through the Google checker and there is no malicious software found on the site. Can anyone tell me what I need to do to get this site unblocked? The url is http://knuma.co.uk/
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Optimist0 -
Site's IP showing WMT 'Links to My Site'
I have been going through, disavowing spam links in WMT and one of my biggest referral sources is our own IP address. Site: Covers.com
Technical SEO | | evansluke
IP: 208.68.0.72 We have recently fixed a number of 302 redirects, but the number of links actually seems to be increasing. Is this something I should ignore / disavow / fix using a redirect?0 -
How Often is Site Crawled
Good morning- I saw some errors in my first crawl and immediately removed the pages from my website. I then re-created my XML sitemap and uploaded to Google. The question I have is will the site be crawled to recognize the changes in the next day or so? The pages were just placed on the site as test pages and never removed. The initial crawl that notified me it was done found the errors and were removed. Thanks for your help. Peter
Technical SEO | | VT_Pete0 -
Have my site been penalised ?
Hi, I recently hired a link builder (who works for a digital marketing agency and wanted to earn some extra cash ) to do some link building for me on keyword Carpet Cleaner Hire Basically , May my ranking for this work has moved from 29 up to 13 , then down to 500 + and now up to 67 ?. It's been all over the place and I am worried that maybe google thinks its unnatural or to many links etc. I looked at some of the work this chap did and there was a log of bookmarks done , apparently to increase social awareness and some articles on random forums I never heard of but the articles didn't look to good and in my eyes were a little spammy.. I don't have any messages in WMT saying I have been penalised or anything but I am naturally worried that this chap may have caused damaged and that I was manually penalised. I have since asked him to stop immediately.. does this sound normal for the ranking to be all over the place in this manner when link building ? How can I tell if I have been manually penalized in any way ? What;s the general consensus ?. Should I contact google or leave it and see what happens ? Other keywords seems to be okay though. Any advice much appreciated. thanks Sarah.
Technical SEO | | SarahCollins1 -
Young site trying hard, but banging head against the wall -- Site Review
Hi All New to PRO but we're seriously committed to getting this working. And firstly thank you to anyone who offers any useful thoughts and insights. We've launched a new site, unfortunately late to the market for the season and are really struggling to get search engine recognition. Site: http://www.ignitehats.co.uk/ We're continuously adding new content, slowly gathering more links and working hard to promote socially. But even on our clearest search terms like "Ignite hats" we're down on page 4. Both GWT and the Seomoz tools highlight no big problems (a few titles that are too long) but otherwise nothing. Maybe wrongly we requested that the Google spam team review our site incase it was being penalised, but got a template response saying the site was not in their spam system (phew, there wasn't a reason it should be we believe). We're wondering if this is just that our site is just too young? It's been live for 6 weeks. But worry maybe this is not the case. We've had success with another site we run much sooner than this. Any help or pointers would be really appreciated. Similar stories and what others have done, at least to give us some confidence to carry on would be great. Thanks for reading.
Technical SEO | | JHill0 -
How to setup tumblr blog.site.com to give juice to site.com
Is it possible to get a subdomain blog.site.com that is on tumblr to count toward site.com. I hoped I could point it in webmaster tools like we do www but alas no. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | oznappies0 -
Best cross linking strategy for micro sites?
Hi Guys. I created a micro site (A design showcase gallery) away from the main website to attract a lot of links in my space from competitors. It works so well it has become a valuable resource in my industry and I believe I will keep it running and adding content to it. Is the best SEO strategy for the main site simply to link from each page to the main site? Or should I be looking at something else? Thanks, Alan
Technical SEO | | spoiltchild0