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.

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.

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.

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!