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.
Merge 2 websites into one, using a non-existing, new domain.
-
I need to merge https://www.WebsiteA.com and https://www.WebsiteB.com to a fresh new domain (with no content) https://www.WebsiteC.com. I want to do it the best way to keep existing SEO juice.
Website A is the companies home page and built with Wordpress
Website B is the company product page and built with Wordpress
Website C will be the new site containing both website A and B, utilizing Wordpress also.
What is the best way to do this? I have research a lot and keep hitting walls on how to do it.
It's a little trickier because it's two different domains going to a brand new domain.
Thanks
-
Thanks Andy!
I'm still a little confused on how I will be copying data over from Site A to Site C. Is it just a matter of creating an empty Wordpress shell with no template and copying the data from Site A to it? (And how is that usually done?) Then would I redirect all Site A's pages to Site C's pages, just with the URL changed? I.E www.SiteA.com/large-dogs redirect to www.SiteC.com/large-dogs
I don't want all of Site B either, just about 10 pages from it, would I manually copy them over also, and how would that be done?
Thanks
-
I did just this type of thing a little over a year ago and organic traffic is up over 300% now. We made the change mainly to improve the structure of the website(s), with more logical organization and better internal linking. We did do the move all at once (thousands of pages) but it took a lot of behind-the scenes planning to be ready for that.
First came the decisions about what sections and categories made sense for our site. (Using the URL structure to guide users around the site makes it easier for them to find what they are looking for and interlinking between related posts as appropriate is also good—and this helps a lot with search engines.)
Then came the organization of posts into their new categories. To make things easier, we kept the individual path names the same (so www.siteA.com/old-category/old-post-string became www.siteC.com/new category/old-post-string) and uploaded them into their new categories when the time came.
We also used this time to do a limited content review (posts with the most traffic) and we updated a lot of these. We made the choice to keep most of our old posts, even though in our market they can get outdated quickly, to conserve any links we may have acquired. (The main site that we were directing to the new site was pretty old and had picked up a lot of links over time.)
We could have done a more complete content review before the changeover, but in part we wanted to see how these posts did under the new structure—we did get renewed life out of some of them, and we further updated and optimized those.
In conjunction with the export of the old sites to the new one, we made sure to 301 redirect all of the old posts to their counterparts on the new site. For the posts we chose not to bring over, we 301 redirected them to a related post in the same category.
We still occasionally come across things that need to be fixed—old posts that need redirecting/updating or 404 errors that need to be tracked down (one big issue we found was a lot of old pages had old links with hard paths to the old website root domains, causing a bunch of nasty internal not found errors—not good!) but overall we are happy with the change. (Up 308%!)
-
Hi,
One way to do this is to decide which site is going to be the main site (site A) sat on C and copy this data over. If you are bringing in site B, then this can sit at another structure level - you will end up with this...
Site A --> Site C, main pages
Site B --> Site C, product pagesThat then brings in everything from both sites to the new domain.
You then want to redirect both of the old sites to the new one, but don't redirect everything to the root. That isn't a good use of 301 mapping. You need to be mapping on a page level so that you will see...
www.sitea.com/about us -301- www.sitec.com/aboutus
www.siteb.com/newproducts/hammers -301- www.sitec.com/newproducts/hammersThere can be differences in the URL's - you don't need to stick with the same structure as the other sites if it doesn't make sense, but always map pages to something very similar.
Page level is the only way to go if you want to maintain a seamless transition for users as well.
Also, don't expect to hit a switch and do this all at once. You can do this over a period of time because to the user, they will just be redirected to the new pages. You will retain more link juice like this.
This is quite a lengthy process and I am sure I have missed the in-between bits, but this is the basis of what you want to be doing.
Others might chip in with other suggestions for you.
-Andy
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
-
What Tools Should I Use To Investigate Damage to my website
I would like to know what tools I should use and how to investigate damage to my website in2town.co.uk I hired a person to do some work to my website but they damaged it. That person was on a freelance platform and was removed because of all the complaints made about them. They also put in backdoors on websites including mine and added content. I also had a second problem where my content was being stolen. My site always did well and had lots of keywords in the top five and ten, but now they are not even in the top 200. This happened in January and feb. When I write unique articles, they are not showing in Google and need to find what the problem is and how to fix it. Can anyone please help
Technical SEO | | blogwoman10 -
GoogleBot still crawling HTTP/1.1 years after website moved to HTTP/2
Whole website moved to https://www. HTTP/2 version 3 years ago. When we review log files, it is clear that - for the home page - GoogleBot continues to only access via HTTP/1.1 protocol Robots file is correct (simply allowing all and referring to https://www. sitemap Sitemap is referencing https://www. pages including homepage Hosting provider has confirmed server is correctly configured to support HTTP/2 and provided evidence of accessing via HTTP/2 working 301 redirects set up for non-secure and non-www versions of website all to https://www. version Not using a CDN or proxy GSC reports home page as correctly indexed (with https://www. version canonicalised) but does still have the non-secure version of website as the referring page in the Discovery section. GSC also reports homepage as being crawled every day or so. Totally understand it can take time to update index, but we are at a complete loss to understand why GoogleBot continues to only go through HTTP/1.1 version not 2 Possibly related issue - and of course what is causing concern - is that new pages of site seem to index and perform well in SERP ... except home page. This never makes it to page 1 (other than for brand name) despite rating multiples higher in terms of content, speed etc than other pages which still get indexed in preference to home page. Any thoughts, further tests, ideas, direction or anything will be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | AKCAC1 -
Two websites, one company, one physical address - how to make the best of it in terms of local visibility?
Hello! I have one company which will be operating in two markets, printing and website design / development. I’m planning on building two websites, each for every market. But I’m a bit confused about how to optimize these websites locally. My thought is to use my physical address for one website (build citations, get listed in directories, etc. ) and PO Box for another. Do you think there is a better idea?
Technical SEO | | VELV1 -
Forwarding a .org domain to a .com domain: any negative impact to consider?
Hello! I have a question I've been unable to find a clear answer to. My client's primary domain is a .com with a satisfactorily high DA. My client owns the .org version of its domain (which has a very low DA, I suppose due to inactivity) but has never forwarded it on. For branding/visibility/traffic reasons, I'd like to recommend they set up the .org domain to forward to the .com domain, but I wanted to ask a few questions first: 1. Does forwarding low-value DA domains to high-value DA domains have any negative authority/SEO impact? 2. If the .org domain was to be forwarded, am I correct that an SSL cert is not necessary for it if the .com domain has an SSL cert? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | mollykathariner_ms1 -
Old domain to new domain
Hi, A website on server A is no longer required. The owner has redirected some URLS of this website (via plugin) to his new website on server B -but not all URLS. So when I use COMMAND site:website A , I see a mixture of redirected URLS and not redirected URLS.Therefore two websites are still being indexed in some form and causing duplication. However, weirdly when I crawl with Screaming Frog I only see one URL which is 301 redirected to the new website. I would have thought I'd see lots of URLs which hadn't been redirected. How come it is different to using the site:command? Anyway, how do I move to the new website completely without the old one being indexed anymore. I thought I knew this but have read so many blogs I've confused myself! Should I: Redirect all URLS via the HTACESS file on old website on server A? There are lots of pages indexed so a lot of URLs. What if I miss some? or Point the old domain via DNS to server B and do the redirects in website B HTaccess file? This seems more sensible but does this method still retain the website rankings? Thanks for any help
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Non-Existent Parent Pages SEO Impact
Hello, I'm working with a client that is creating a new site. They currently are using the following URL structure: http://clientname.com/products/furry-cat-muffins/ But the landing page for the directory /products/ does not actually have any content. They have a similar issue for the /about/ directory where the menu actually sends you to /about/our-story/ instead of /about/. Does it hurt SEO to have the URL structure set up in this way and also does it make sense to create 301 redirects from /about/ to /about/our-story/?
Technical SEO | | Alder0 -
Does image domain name matter when using a CDN?
Has anyone does studies on using a different CDN domain name for images on a site? Here is an example:
Technical SEO | | findwell
or
http://cdn.mydomain.com/image.jpg>
mydomain.com ranks highly and many images show up in Google/Bing image searches. Is there any actual data that says that using your real domain name for the CDN has benefits versus the default domain name provided by the CDN provider? On the surface, it feels like it would, but I haven't experimented with it.
0 -
SEO Benefit from Redirecting New Exact Match Domains?
Hi, All! This is a question asked in the old Q & A section, but the answer was a little ambiguous and it was about 3 years ago, so I decided to repost and let the knowledgeable SEO public answer... From David LaFerney: It’s clear that it’s much easier to get high rankings for a term if your domain is an exact match for the query. If you own several such domains that are very related such as – investmentrealestate.com, positivecashflow.com, and rentalproperty.com – would you be able to benefit from those by 301ing them to a single site, or would you have to maintain separate sites to help capture those targeted phrases? In a nutshell – SEO wise, is it worth owning multiple domains to exactly match valuable search phrases? Or do you lose the exact match benefit when you redirect?>> To clarify: redirecting an old domain with lots of history and links to a new exact match domain seems to contain SEO benefit. (You get links+exact match domain, approximately.) But the other way around? Redirecting a new exact match domain to an older domain with links? Does that do anything for the ranking of the old domain for the exact match keyword? Or absolutely nothing? (My impression has been that it's nothing, but the question came up for a client and I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.) Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | debi_zyx0