What is the best SEO friendly way to combine two websites.

[SEOhmygod]

I have two websites, eg:

widgets.com - sells expensive widgets as gifts

everydaywidgets.com - sells cheap widgets for everyday use.

I would like to combine them both under the widgets.com domain name, because its easier to run the SEO campaign for one rather than two. But i still want two different product collections, and two different sites.

widgets.com is by far the larger of the two sites so my current thought is to have that the main landing site, and have a button at the top to take the user to widgets.com/everydaywidgets where they have a similar but different site, and different products.

I can set this all up no problem with the correct 301 redirects from everydaywidgets.com, but is it SEO friendly? Does anyone know of a real world example of a business doing this?

Cheers

[becole]

Luckily, 301 redirecting from one site to another (when moving a site) and using the Google Change of Address Tool has taken out a lof of the risk that used to exist. if done properly, you should benefit from combining both sites and not lose any rankings.

You're on the right track, I would outline the content and make sure that there's not any content that overlaps--every product/service and every page should be unique and not cause any duplicate content issues.

Generally speaking, you'd want to do what you're planning, which is to use a directory off of your main domain and then 301 redirect the pages from the old site to the new pages on the new site. Use the Google Change of Address Tool to tell Google about the change.

I would fully integrate the pages into your main navigation on the site rather than just provide a link--it's important that the new pages get all the internal links that they can.

[aarongray]

Doing 301 is always going to be a risk But if you do them right they can work fine.

I can't give you the site sadly but we had to do this for a very large client about 18 months ago. They sold shoes and they had two brands they wanted to put into one site.

What we did was a full reband and put everything under the one style and layout. This helped a lot because users were able to flow between the different products without getting lost.

From an SEO point of view we 301 each page to match the new page. there is easy sidewide ways to do 301 but as we were moving to a new flow. So we put the time and money into customising each 301. We also made sure to take the same seo onsite over too.

hope this helps and best of luck too.