Website(s) Merge Questions
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Hello Moz Community
I have three separate websites that I have planned on merging into one. I recently acquired a strong domain ( stronger than my existing ones ) & after much deliberation, I have decided to move them together into one domain.
Site 1) 1 Forum - Around since 2007 - Originally VBulletin, last year migrated to discourse.
Site 2) E-commercece Magento Site - Around since 2010
Site 3) WordPress - Blog & Articles - Around since last year - Currently using the new ( Main Domain I want to use )
After a lot of research and White Board Fridays, I was thinking this would be my best bet:
- newdomain.com - Merged WordPress & Magento CMS Page.
- newdomain.com/ forum <-- Will move my forum content & Install to the new domain.
- newdomain.com/ store <-- Will move my Ecommerce content & Install.
Between my developer and I, we have our heads around how to handle the technical aspect of the move, 301s to the new location etc.
But one area we want to research before pulling the trigger ( we haven't found much data on this )
**My Main Question:**What is the possible penalty coming for shopping websites vs. content-driven websites, and possibility that forum-based content hosted on the same domain might cause another penalty to be applied to the other content on the domain.
**My Developer Says:**In recent years, we noticed that forum content had been penalized in favor of editorially reviewed content when this is identified by search engines.
What big hiccups would / could we encounter from combining these 3 types of platforms into one site?Many thanks for any direction or insight. -
Thank you very much, I greatly appreciate the response. Any other feedback from is welcome.
Thank you!
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For your "main question": I think the chances of this are slim if you maintain a quality site. Content review and moderation should be enforced in the forum to avoid any types of issues with low quality UGC... the migration is a good time to review the content you are copying over.
Regarding what your developer says, yes there is some risk of issues because of the forum, but if you do a good job moderating this shouldn't be any type of issue. Lastly, I wouldn't expect any type of "penalty" carrying over to the other sections of your site as G has gotten pretty decent lately at separating wheat from chaff when assessing site quality.
As a suggestion: I would set-up each of those subfolders independently within GSC so you can monitor for any traffic/impression fluctuations, higher profile pages, etc. independently.
-Jake Bohall
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