SEO Risks for redirecting sites

[Level2Designs]

Hey Everyone,

I've tried searching for this question, but am not exactly sure what keywords to search for so I'm probably missing the resources if they already exist...

My client has had duplicated sites for years, and after multiple penalizations of those sites I was finally able to convince him to consolidate them into a "mega-site". Currently, he has a main domain, a geo-subdomain for each office location under the main domain, and a geo-domain for each office location.

We plan on redirecting each geo-domain to the corresponding geo-subdomain.  So, the final result will be one main domain, and a sub-domain for each office location.

I'm looking for any information regarding tracking SEO data after the redirects are in place, how to guard against potential drops in SERPs, what's the smartest strategy to implement, etc... My client is very sensitive to his sites' SEO data, so if anyone has any SEO-related advice regarding redirecting sites it would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

[MikeRoberts]

Her general example was based on her, Matt Cutts and another Google employee having Fitness websites that she then buys and how she would go about the use of canonicals and 301s to show users and search engines that she is the most relevant authority. One of the pluses with the canonicals involved branded searches that would still pull the Matt Cutts site instead of the Maile Ohye site but link equity would be directed to her site and users would be less likely to bounce since the canonical would serve the Matt page whereas a 301 may be jarring at first because if you're looking for Matt and get Maile you may be more likely to bounce even though its the content you are looking for.

(God, I swear I can explain this better in my own head than I can once I attempt to write it out... which is bad considering I actually make a living writing)

[EGOL]

I have found that folders perform better than subdomains.

I have done 301 redirects of subdomains into folders and the rankings went up strongly.  I attribute this to combining the link popularity.

[Level2Designs]

Hey Mike,

That sounds like an interesting discussion and sorry I couldn't hear it in person. I'm not sure if this would be relevant to my specific project though - our ultimate goal is to merge two existing sites into one. They have relatively the same content and subjects, meaning the userbase is also probably very similar. The speech that you're referring to sounds like it would be more suitable for a site that is going through a redesign and moving to a new domain name. Your thoughts?

[Level2Designs]

I was leaning towards doing all the redirects at once, but didn't have the experience to back that theory up. Thanks for the advice!

[Level2Designs]

Hi EGOL,

The sites that we are merging were penalized about 2 years ago. Their value has since begun to increase again, but they still haven't reached the level they were at before the penalization. After all the research we did to answer "why" they were penalized, we could only assume that it was because of our client's massive network of sites.

This was all implemented before I came onto the project. A mistake was made somewhere along the way that set off a "red flag" to Google that these sites were in cahoots (for lack of a better phrase) and penalized them.

We're hoping that the penalization occurred long enough ago that it will not harm the sites we are consolidating the penalized sites into.

My understanding of subdomains vs. folders is that for instances where the topics could virtually be separated (as is the case with multiple geographical locations), then subdomains are the optimal way to go. My client is also interested in ranking well in Google Local, and wants to have separate listings for each business location - which will also be beneficial if we take the subdomain route. I'll admit though, I'm a bit rusty on this topic and would welcome any advice or further resources! I'll do some more research, but if you have any further thoughts on the matter please do send them my way!

Thanks again!

[Level2Designs]

Thanks, TommyTan, that's very reassuring!

[EGOL]

I generally advocate for consolidating a group of sites.... but... are some of these sites penalized?  Might be a good idea to understand why and the impact of merging them with unpenalized sites.

Also, if you are going to consolidate, combing the site into folders instead of subdomains can merge the domain authority.  Do some research on this before move forward.

[MikeRoberts]

This reminded me of something Maile Ohye from Google was talking about at SMX NY.

In her talk about 301 vs Rel=Canonical she brought up the idea of putting notices on a site first that Site A is now a part of the Site B Family and will be consolidated in the future and giving people (and the spiders) a link to the new site to start building relevancy. Then later on implementing canonicals across Site A pointing to the relevant places on Site B. Gradually moving towards 301 redirects once Site B becomes the place people now recognize as the main site and the original is no longer needed.

[This of course is all paraphrased and from memory as I don't have my voice recordings of the session handy nor did anyone from Google provide PDFs of their slideshows]

[TommyTan]

Hi Daniel,

From what I know, I don't believe their is any risk at doing all the domains at once.  Furthermore, you are not doing to the same page but from geodomains to different geo-subdomains.  I've  read about people redirecting 50,000 pages in comments and I don't recall anyone mentioning their is any risk.

The only risk I can think of is it might take longer for search engines to recrawl all the pages.  Maybe someone can show some light in this.

You can tell your client that suffer a few drop in ranks in the short run for success in the long run.

[ahead4]

As TommyTan says:

For large redirect projects, you should redirect all that you want to keep the value from.  Don't mass redirect to a single page, as most won’t end up passing value, so keep all redirects pointed to pages which are relevant to the original.

You will have to wait a little while for search engines to recrawl and update their indexes. For a clean switchover that pushes all existing link juice to the new pages I'd do them at once.

[Level2Designs]

Hi TommyTan,

Thanks for this info and the article, it's a great resource! We plan on mapping out both sites entirely and matching the topics A to A and B to B as you mentioned and this reminded me of a question I should have included in my last post:

Are there any potential risks to doing these redirects all at once? We have at least 3 domains that we want to redirect to the corresponding subdomains, and we don't want to make such a major change to the site that we risk major SERP drops. I'm wondering if we should redirect one domain at a time over a few months, or just do it all in one major sweep...

We're expecting the delay in seeing the affects, and while I know it's unavoidable, convincing my client of this is the big challenge! Like I said, he's very sensitive to his site's SEO data, and any drop in stats after we make a major change instantly makes him second guess the move.

Thanks again!

[TommyTan]

Hi Daniel,

Using 301 redirect is definitely the best bet.  301 redirect usually transfer 99% of the SEO to your new page so I don't believe there is any risk other than making a mistake while setting it up.

When you are redirecting make sure that eacy specific page is redirecting to another specific that is similar.  You don't want a visitor wanting to learn something specific and you redirect them to the home page.   You are losing opportunities there.  So redirect home page to home page, topic A to topic A, topic B to topic B.

After setting up all the redirects, it might take a while for Search Engines to recrawl so don't fret when you still don't see any effect after a week or so.

SEOmoz wrote a SEO Redirection Best Practices Article, hopefully it will help!

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection