Redirecting Pages from site A to site B

[Webrevolve]

Hi,

I have a client who have a solid, high ranking content based site (site A). They have now created an ecommerce site in addition (site B).

To give site B a boost in terms of search engine visibility upon launch, they now wish to redirect approx 90% of site As pages to site B.

What would be the implications of this? Apart from customers being automatically redirected from the page they thought they where landing on, how would google now view site A?

What are your thoughts to thier idea. I am trying to talk them out of it as I think its a poor one.

[gazzerman1]

DO NOT interlink your sites with dofollow links, Google hates this kind of activity and can penalize both sites for this.

It is a blatant attempt to self promote your own site and will be seen as a paid link. If you have a good site, I would not mess with it.

I would look at better ways to integrate the eCommerce site into the current existing site, why do you need a new site with a new url?

[Webrevolve]

Thanks Chris,

A good Answer.

best,

[GPainter]

You would have a drop in rankings.

Normally if you 301 a page to a relevant page you shouldn't loose any link juice however if you don't there is a lose.

Matt Cutts does touch on it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw

Site A would vanish and Site B wouldn't rank as well as the established site A  it's sort of like chopping it in half you don't have a whole site only two half ranked sites (to a degree)

I wouldn't say Google would see it as cloaking etc. (unless you move the 301 back after a short while) Google should look at the 301 and think "This is now where all the links should go" however if there is no relevance there it might think "well this isn't relevance to this search query" and then give priority to a page that may have more relevance.

Unfortunately its a bit vague sorry but it's always a tad Hard to give certains. If you're going to remove site A all together then 301 its fine but if your doing it as a quick fix it will work in the short term but longer term your going to find it a bit harder.

as I mentioned it may be easier to have links to relevant pages so if your on site A on a product you could have a link to site B with a similar product. you would be sharing the juice to a degree and reinforcing the relevance of both sites.

Feel free to get more advice as more research never hurts and that's just an opinion really but good luck let us know how it all goes.

[Webrevolve]

Thanks Chris,

What do you thin the negatives would be? Literally, the client wants to redirect site a's man navigation menus to site B.

Would google then look at site a as some sort of link farm / cloaking site?

[GPainter]

I would agree that this is indeed a poor idea, a better idea may be to create some links between site A & B to pass link juice that way. You would loose some traffic and rather than have 1 good site and 1 needs some work site you would have two sites that need work.

I would suggest getting a landing page on site B start some basic SEO on that to give it a nudge prior to launch and give it some SEO focus with some links on site A pointing to relevant sections of site B.

Good luck!