Redirection Question - Can Anyone Help?

[SO_UK]

Hi Community,

I have 2 job boards.

Job board A is a .co.uk domain. Job board B is uk.com domain.

Job board A displays jobs in the UK but has an international jobs section. Job board B focuses entirely on international jobs.

To cut a long story short we are shutting down Job board B as we are going to just be using Job board A in future.

In terms of redirection, would it be best to:

1. 301 redirect job board B domain to Job board A. (www.jobboardb.uk.com -> www.jobboarda.co.uk)

or

2. 301 redirect job board b to the international jobs section on job board a (as this is the most relevant place for the user to go

I am thinking to go with option 2, but I read somewhere that it wasn't best practice. Any help is much appreciated.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I agree with Kevin here. Relevance is key when it comes to your users (and search engines). You could take it a step further and redirect job URLs on board B to the related job URLs on board A, that way users go directly where they need to go should they have clicked a link from a third party or another site. It might take a minute to do, but the payoff is a better user experience and organic equity being transferred correctly. Here's a tutorial on how to do a redirect map.

Hope this helps! Good luck!
P

[KevinBudzynski]

I agree with 2. Always do 301's to pages that are most relevant. If not, organics and conversion will most likely drop.