Redirecting Entire Microsite Content to Main Site Internal Pages?
-
I am currently working on improving site authority for a client site. The main site has significant authority, but I have learned that the company owns several other resource-focused microsites which are stagnant, but which have accrued significant page authority of their own (thought still less than the main site).
Realizing the fault in housing good content on a microsite rather than the main site, my thought is that I can redirect the content of the microsites to internal pages on the main site as a "Resources" section.
I am wondering a: if this is a good idea and b: the best way to transfer site authority from these microsites. I am also wondering how to organize the content and if, for example, an entire microsite domain (e.g. microsite.com) should in fact be redirected to internal resource pages (e.g. mainsite.com/resources).
Any input would be greatly appreciated!
-
Thank you for the tips and encouragement!
I feel a lot more confident about this project now, but if you could address one final question, I am still a little concerned about transfer of domain authority since one of the microsites gets top listings and nearly rivals the main site.
I realize domain authorities will by no means be combined, but I'm hoping the new inside pages don't lose so much page authority that they drop in the serps and, more importantly, that a significant impact can be made to the domain authority of the main site.
Basically, the main site is optimized and listing for our most valuable keywords and I'm hoping that the transfer of the microsite pages can provide a boost at the domain level.
Any insight would be much appreciated!
-
Sounds like you've got a good handle on your strategy, which to me seems sound.
Couple points of advice:
1. Make sure the microsites have a clean backlink profile. Use OSE or another tool to check for paid links, spammy article submissions, etc. You want to make sure not to transfer any bad links to your main site.
2. Do your best to 301 redirect individual URLs to specific URLs on your new site, keeping care to maintain the subject matter, content, structure, title tags etc. If these change too much, Google will interpret this as a change of subject, and you may lose any transferred authority.
3. Follow best practices for migrating domains.
Hope this helps. Sounds like your on the right track. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
If it is relevant to Sofas, you might be able to put it directly on that page. But yeah, having relevant content for each category makes sense for the user.
You can move the content over and the do 301 page-to-page redirects to the main site.
i.e
Sofas.com to furniture.com/sofas
contemporary sofas to furniture.com/contemporary-sofas
Good luck!
-
Thanks, what you've mentioned is basically my end goal. To answer your first question: the content on the microsites is mostly articles and informational content.
To build upon your furniture.com example: The main site is currently broken into relevant subfolders, but the informational content that should be there is living on the respective microsites. My goal is to move the microsite resource content such that content on sofas.com would be accessible from the main site via **furniture.com/sofas/resources **(for example).
An alternative could be to build an independent furniture.com/resources page and then build out subcategories from there. However, I think it is better UX to have the resources delivered relative to each category.
-
Thank you for the quick response. Each microsite is pretty comprehensive, so I think they would fit well as a single resources section or as independent resource sections within each main site product category.
However, each site is also branded differently, would there be any risks to avoid when changing design elements surrounding the text, titles, meta, etc?
*I should also note that some of the microsites do draw some rankings because of direct URL matches for some of our valuable keywords. That said, they contain good content that should be used to build authority for the main site. I am hoping redirecting won't hurt current listings too much, or that the authority boost gained from redirection will be more valuable than keyword listings for microsites.
-
BTW, have you thought about doing a 301 redirect to a relevant subfolder of the main site?
For example, the main site is furniture.com, microsite is sofas.com, you redirect sofas.com to furniture.com/sofas.html.
-
By content, are you talking about category and product descriptions? or articles, guides, etc.? Both?
-
I would definitely bring the content onto the main domain.
As far as how to structure the folders - it depends on the content. If it sits quite naturally as a stand alone section then a resources folder would make sense.
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
-
Our original content is being outranked on search engines by smaller sites republishing our content.
We a media site, www.hope1032.com.au that publishes daily content on the WordPress platform using the Yoast SEO plugin. We allow smaller media sites to republish some of our content with canonical field using our URL. We have discovered some of our content is now ranking below Or not visible on some search engines when searching for the article heading. Any thoughts as to why? Have we got an SEO proble? An interesting point is the small amount of content we have republished is not ranking against the original author on search engines.
Technical SEO | | Hope-Media0 -
Use 302 redirect when site crashes
My company has switched to a new ecommerce platform that we are not totally familiar with yet. As we've worked with it, we've had a couple situations where both the front and back ends of our site crashed simultaneously (always after installing a third party module). The platform's built-in backup solution hasn't been an option in those situations so we've been coming up with alternatives. We now have a duplicate of the site on our server for such emergencies. The plan is to have pages on the broken site point to the backup site using 302 redirects until the broken site is fixed. Is this correct usage of the 302 redirect? I often see people recommend to never use 302 redirects, but I thought this might be the kind of situation where they'd be appropriate. If so, are there other SEO considerations we should keep in mind? For example, I'm wondering if we should put canonical tags on the temporary site that point to the broken site so the broken site stays in the SE indexes.
Technical SEO | | Kyle_M1 -
Page disappeared from Google index. Google cache shows page is being redirected.
My URL is: http://shop.nordstrom.com/c/converse Hi. The week before last, my top Converse page went missing from the Google index. When I "fetch as Googlebot" I am able to get the page and "submit" it to the index. I have done this several times and still cannot get the page to show up. When I look at the Google cache of the page, it comes up with a different page. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://shop.nordstrom.com/c/converse shows: http://shop.nordstrom.com/c/pop-in-olivia-kim Back story: As far as I know we have never redirected the Converse page to the Pop-In page. However the reverse may be true. We ran a Converse based Pop-In campaign but that used the Converse page and not the regular Pop-In page. Though the page comes back with a 200 status, it looks like Google thinks the page is being redirected. We were ranking #4 for "converse" - monthly searches = 550,000. My SEO traffic for the page has tanked since it has gone missing. Any help would be much appreciated. Stephan
Technical SEO | | shop.nordstrom0 -
Redirect a 301 Redirect
Does any link juice get passed from a permanent redirect to a new 301 redirect? If so, are there any studies which indicate an estimated percentage?
Technical SEO | | RedCaffeine0 -
Pages with content defined by querystring
I have a page that show traveltips: http://www.spies.dk/spanien/alcudia/rejsemalstips-liste This page shows all traveltips for Alcudia. Each traveltip also has its own url: http://www.spies.dk/spanien/alcudia/rejsemalstips?TravelTipsId=19767 ( 2 weeks ago i noticed the url http://www.spies.dk/spanien/alcudia/rejsemalstips show up in google webmaster tools as a 404 page, along with 100 of others urls to the subpage /rejsemalstips WITHOUT a querystring. With no querystring there is no content on the page and it goes 404. I need my technicians to redirect that page so it shows the list, but in the meantime i would like to block it in robots.txt But how do i block a page if it is called without a querystring?
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
Duplicate Content - Mobile Site
We think that a mobile version of our site is causing a duplicate content issue; what's the best way to stop the mobile version being indexed. Basically the site forwards mobile users to "/mobile" which is just a mobile optimised version of the original site. Is it best to block the /mobile folder from being crawled?
Technical SEO | | nsmith7870 -
See any issues with this tabbed content page?
When I view source, and view as Googlebot it's showing as 1 long page of content = good. However, the developer uses some redirects and dynamic page generation to pull this off. I didn't see any issues from a Search perspective but would appreciate a second opinion: Click here Thanks!
Technical SEO | | 540SEO0 -
First click on SEO redirecting to a competitor site?
I just experienced something VERY odd and wondered if any of you had an idea of what it might be. When I did a search on Google and clicked the top SEO listing I was taken to a competitor of the number 1 listed site i.e. NOT the site I clicked on. When I clicked the back button and clicked it again, I was taken to the correct site. This happened with two different searches and I was taken to two different sites. Could this be a clever/sinister cookie implemented by the competitor; a site I frequent regularly? Could this be malware implemented by an affiliate? Could this be a Google glitch?
Technical SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie0