Migrating a site from a standalone site to a subdivision of large .gov.uk site

[smrs-digital]

The scenario

We’ve been asked by a client, a Non-Government Organisation who are being absorbed by a larger government ministry, for help with the SEO of their site.

They will be going from a reasonably large standalone site to a small sub-directory on a high authority government site and they want some input on how best to maintain their rankings.

They will be going from the Number 1 ranked site in their niche (current site domainRank 59) to being a sub directory on a domainRank 100 site). The current site will remain, but as a members only resource, behind a paywall.

I’ve been checking to see the impact that it had on a related site, but that one has put a catch all 302 redirect on it’s pages so is losing the benefit of a it’s historical authority.

My thoughts

• Robust 301 redirect set up to pass as much benefit as possible to the new pages.
• Focus on rewriting content to promote most effective keywords – would suggest testing of titles, meta descriptions etc but not sure how often they will be able to edit the new site.
• ‘We have moved’ messaging going out to webmasters of existing linking sites to try to encourage as much revision of linking as possible.
• Development of link-bait to try and get the new pages seen.

Am I going about this the right way?

Thanks in advance.

Phil

[smrs-digital]

Hey Ryan

Thanks for the input. Will definitely focus on the strongest content they have and work from there.

Will explore possibilities for a 404.

Phil

[AdoptionHelp]

Yep your game plan is pretty good. Since they may not be able to do a lot of editing after its up, you may want to gear your research towards finding their best ranking pages and using the content/markup of those pages as a basis for the new pages. If its possible, create a 404 page that can recommend pages based on keywords in the URL. If thats not possible, at least get a search bar on the 404 page.