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.
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
-
Sitemap.xml strategy for site with thousands of pages
I have a client that has a HUGE website with thousands of product pages. We don't currently have a sitemap.xml because it would take so much power to map the sitemap. I have thought about creating a sitemap for the key pages on the website - but didn't want to hurt the SEO on the thousands of product pages. If you have a sitemap.xml that only has some of the pages on your site - will it negatively impact the other pages, that Google has indexed - but are not listed on the sitemap.xml.
Technical SEO | | jerrico10 -
What to do with old content after 301 redirect
I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?
Technical SEO | | LindsayE0 -
Is there a limit to Internal Redirect?
I know Google says there is no limit to it but I have seen on many websites that too many 301 redirects can be a problem and might negatively affect your rankings in SERPs. I wanted to know especially from people who worked on large ecommerce site. How do they manage internal redirect from one URL to other and how many according to you are too many. I mean if you get a website that contain 300 plus 301 redirections within the website, how will you deal with that? Please let me know if the question is not clear.
Technical SEO | | MoosaHemani0 -
How do I redirect the Author archive page in Wordpress?
If you do a search for my name on Google, the first result is the author archive page of my Wordpress blog. I would like to redirect the author page to my "about me" page but cannot add a 301 as the author page is created dynamically in Wordpress. Anyone know how I can do this?
Technical SEO | | richdan0 -
Is it good to redirect million of pages on a single page?
My site has 10 lakh approx. genuine urls. But due to some unidentified bugs site has created irrelevant urls 10 million approx. Since we don’t know the origin of these non-relevant links, we want to redirect or remove all these urls. Please suggest is it good to redirect such a high number urls to home page or to throw 404 for these pages. Or any other suggestions to solve this issue.
Technical SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Do quizzes hurt your site? Thin content?
We did a 10 question quiz awhile back relating to something we were sponsoring, and it had a decent response. However, considering quizzes just aren't that long, does that contribute to making the site's content thin? Obviously, it's not a major problem at the moment, but if we did more of them would this be an issue? If there's no real issue, I'd prefer not to no-index them, but I'd love some feedback to help make the decision. Thanks, Ruben
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Delete old site but redirect domain to a new domain and site
I just have a quick query and I have a feeling about what the answer is so just wanted to see what you guys thought... Basically I am working on a client site. This client has a few other websites that are divisions of their company. However these divisions/websites are no longer used. They are wanting to delete the websites but redirect the domains to their name main website. They believe this will pass on SEO benefits as these old division sites are old and have a good PR and history. I'm unsure for DEFINITE, which way is correct?
Technical SEO | | Weerdboil0