301 from multiple domains to one single webshop

[snorkel]

First of all i want to introduce myself. My name is Jennifer and i am a webshop owner from the Netherlands (we sell plants/herbs products)

I have a very important question (and i can`t find a clear answer on the internet). So i hope someone can help me,

At this moment me and 4 other friends own each a seperate webshop. We all started the webshops 5 -7 years ago and work all in the same business. (plants/herbs).

We talked last week, and we want to make one big company and combine all 5 company`s. All 5 webshops have a huge pagerank, lots of organic traffic and very good incomming links.

We registered new domainnames and want to redirect the 5 "old" domains to one new domain to pass over the Google juice.

Our new company is a multilanguage webshop and each language has its own domain. (for example)

(www. plantsandherbs example .nl)
(www. plantsandherbs example .de)
(www. plantsandherbs example .de)
(www. plantsandherbs example .es)
(www. plantsandherbs example .fr)
(www. plantsandherbs example .com)

Does it harm us if we 301 redirect all the 5 "old" websites to the new webshop? And what is the best way to redirect the "old" webshops to the new one?

I am afraid of a Google penalty because it maybe looks like we bought some domains to pass the juice to the new project.

[mrdavidingram]

Hi Jennifer,

Using 301 redirects is the answer, and I wouldn't worry about any kind of penalty from Google for this (any kind of manual inspection would show that it's a legitimate business merger).

There won't be any harm in using a 301 redirect, however you will lose some link juice (exactly how much is unknown, but this unfortunately is an unavoidable consequence of moving sites).

I would advise installing 301 redirects on a page by page level to carry across the individual strength you've built up for each page of your site (and consequently the keywords associated). This makes it a much bigger job and involves a lot of strategy planning, but it will be worth it as it will carry the existing traffic and rankings across from the current sites.

So for example, rather than redirect the entire oldplantsite.nl domain to the newplantsite.nl homepage, go through each page and direct it to the most relevant page on the new site.

For example:

oldplantsite.nl/brazillian-rose-plant should redirect to the most relevant page on your new site, so something like newplantsite.nl/brazillian-plants

This will also be great for user experience too as they will always be landing on a page relevant to the link or search result they clicked to get to your new site.

In regards to the various other localised sites, this won't be an issue as long as you use the appropriate meta mark-up and Webmaster tools options.

Thanks,

David