Migrating micro site into existing website

[ViviCa1]

My company is planning to migrate an existing (ecommerce) micro site - which sits on its own domain - into their main ecommerce site. This means that the content will be moved from www.microdomain.co.uk to www.maindomain.com/category. Some products already exist on the main domain.

The micro site is fairly small with just over 400 pages - I am planning to map each URL to the new URL (exact corresponding page) and create 301 redirects for each. Where any additional content does not exist yet on the existing main domain, we will create it and 301 redirect to it.

The micro site currently ranks fairly well for some keywords - being such a specialised micro site, (some of) the keywords also form part of the domain name, however, they won't on the main page although they may form part of the URL (category).

As an example (using a made up URL), our micro site www.bread-sticks.co.uk ranks on page 1 for the keyword bread sticks - we don't just sell bread sticks on www.bread-sticks.co.uk but also rolls and bread though, bread sticks is one category of very closely related categories. Say our main domain is www.supermarket.co.uk (selling a wide range of food / drink products. The micro site will be moving to www.supermarket.co.uk/baked-products/ - which is a category. Within that category, there are sub categories, i.e. bread sticks, rolls and bread which will sit under www.supermarket.co.uk/bread-sticks/ etc.

What would be the best way for ensuring that our main domain would take over the rankings from our micro site, given that it will be sitting on our main domain as a category (one of many)? Can we expect www.supermarket.co.uk/baked-products/ or www.supermarket.co.uk/bread-sticks/ to replace www.bread-sticks.co.uk in the rankings simply by 301 redirecting?

Thanks for your help!

[ViviCa1]

Thanks, great to hear of someone else's experience with a similar issue. Glad to hear your rankings mostly improved where you had a corresponding page on the main website. Makes me hopeful that the same will be the case for us.

[ViviCa1]

Thanks, good point to keep in mind re. brand mentions etc. I will have a little dig around GA and SC to see where exactly our organic traffic for the micro site comes from to see how much we can expect to lose due to navigational domain queries etc.

[Yoav-Blustein]

Well, i had a problematic case in my previous position where we had a main/big niche site ranking nicely to many sub-niches. lets call the niche "xxx" and sub niches "yyy xxx" , "aaa xxx" etc..

To cut down on maintenance we have decided to migrate all 5 sub-niche (micro) sites which all had 1st page rankings for the majority of their respective keywords. Similar to your case, the main and niche sites the had same categories and sub pages.

We chose one domain to see if everything goes smoothly, we have done the URL mapping while keeping URL renaming to minimal on the main site. 
Almost on every single page the content on the main site was better, indepth and fresh.
It was a hard debate, but after some trial and error we decided to go with minimal changes to the main site. 
Our keywords for the merged pages mostly got better rankings (however we saw some fluctuations like -20, +10 etc for a while.. and all got stable after 2-3 weeks).
For pages that didnt existed on the main site, after the redirections in most cases our losses were between 3-10 rankings. Some of them we managed to recover with regular SEO efforts and some are still moving randomly between spots/pages..

go figure

[ViviCa1]

Thanks for your reply, Yossi.

I think I should clarify that it's not just the categories that are already pre-existing but also (most of) the products. They are currently offered both through the main website and the micro site. I only recently joined the company - as far as I know they did try to reword the product descriptions to avoid duplicate content issues, however, I will need to look into how much they actually differ.

We want to retire the micro site, however, for these specific search terms related to what we sell on the micro site, the micro site does tend to rank better. So I suppose we would want to keep the copy from the microsite if possible?

In terms of DA, our main website is slightly better than the microsite, but both are very low - 18 vs. 12. I was told they never did any active link building and I cannot find a lot of links apart from our own websites through tools like OSE.

I have created a list of all existing URLs using Screaming Frog but that is a good point about using a few other tools to verify that my list is as complete as possible.

[EGOL]

If you move the content and redirect the pages then you get new pages into the SERPs and get the value of redirected links.

What you don't get are things like brand mentions, domain type-ins, navigational domain queries, visitor behavior, SERP CTR, and more.  The more mature the website the more valuable these other assets might be.  Some of these assets will evaporate with the move, some will be reset to zero and others might be inherited.

All you can hope for is to do what you can to conserve these things.

[Yoav-Blustein]

Hi

Well it is a practice done often, but do not expect to get the same rankings as you had with the micro-domain, you will see some drops. Some will gain their rankings back and others will need SEO push. The time it takes depends on many factors such as domain authority, site freshness etc..

Whenever i go and merge domains or incorporate them, i try to find the best user-friendly category architecture. First it should make sense to the user (how everything is lined up) and than to google.

IMO, if all the redirections are done correctly, the only problem that you might have is with the pre-existing categories. I would double and triple check all URLs, run extensive crawls on the site with Moz Crawl (limited no# of URLS though.. ) DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog etc. and look into the URLs. Its amazing how one program cant find some URLs and others do.. You will want to avoid duplicate content issues

Of course i don't even mention how closely you need to monitor everything.. I would do a list of the most important URLs to be transferred, and closely monitor them. Also i always suggest to go with very minimal content changes(also meta changes to minimal).. keeping it as close as to original and only then, after everything is good and healthy, i would go and start making improvements on the content..

I know how much time consuming robotic job it is so good luck

P.S.: Also it's a good and common paractice to go ahead and contact site owners for the relevant good and natural backlinks that you have gathered over time..