How to handle a merge with another site
-
I own a gaming site at legendzelda.net
Recently a site zelda-temple.net wanted to merge communities and sites. We pretty much scrapped their content (a lot was articles I already had topics on), merged the user databases, and redirected the domain to mine.
What is the best seo way to redirect that domain. I tried to set up a 301 on the entire domain to gain all the backlinks that site had (A LOT) but it seems as if a lot are not being picked up by the open site explorer and other tools.
Advice?
-
Then I would do it as you have and just understand it will take a bit longer.
-
The main focus of my site is news and coverage on the most recent games.
Like
http://legendzelda.net/zelda-skyward-sword/
The other games are older and get less coverage and sadly my site was not around when some of these games came out (back to the 80's) so I am focusing on news and the most recent games. As you will see the page linked there has a better PA than some the older games as this one just came out and was the focus for quite some time.
So am not looking to boost the PA for most inner pages. Just wanting to get all the pages from that old site to go to my main page, get the news, see who I am, and hopefully become a daily reader.
-
I do not believe that will work for you the way you are hoping. As it stands, what you are doing is redirecting every page on zelda-temple to legendzelda.net, your home page. Since I don't know much about legends of Zelda (I am more of a Modern Warfare kinda guy)
I am assuming the site generates money from sponsors and that those sponsors are on various pages throughout.
If someone wants to go to a given page for say "majoras Mask", your PA there is 21 (you only have one linking root domain) whereas your homepage today is at 51.So long as you believe all will come to the homepage and stay there long enough to look at sponsors before going on, leave it as is.
If you want to enhance the site and have more people seeing individual pages (through better ranking) as opposed to the homepage, you need to change the 301 so that you are linking url to url.
Best
-
Due to the way the old site was set up that is not possible so it is not an option at this point
-
That's not the best way to do it. The method Robert outlined is better.
-
I have implemented this and it seems to be working now. Does this look like a solution that will work and if so will I start to see the links coming toward the new domain here when the linkscape update goes down next month?
RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^zelda-temple.netRewriteRule (.) http://www.zelda-temple.net/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteEngine onRewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.zelda-temple.net$RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://legendzelda.net [R=301,L]
-
I am wanting to have it where it will be
to newsite.com/
oldsite/forums
to
Every page on old site to index of new site.
I have tried a variety of 301s and rewrites with no success.
And this merger actually went down back in late October and i had the domain redirecting to my new one and been checking for updates to the linkscape since then and havent seen anything.
-
if your 301 is domain to domain it will not work or will take forever. You need to set up the 301 in the .htaccess file and do it url to url. So, if you had zelda-temple.net/xyz/ and on your site you had othertemple.com/xyz you would 301 the zelda/xyz to yoursurl/xyz.
This way the link juice will be transferred around 90%
Typically we see as much as 95% transferred over several months.
As to showing in OSE, due to the timing of the crawls you will not see changes for 5 to 7 weeks and then monthly thereafter. No need to watch that daily. The schedule for the crawl is here: http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape-Schedule
Hope this helps
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My site Metrics are not as per they should
Hi, I am regularly making links on my site to improve its metrics but i am confused how other people fastly improve their DA/PA and my DA/PA is not improving with that site. The same happened with spam score. It has been a month i disavow my links having spam score but instead of decrease in it, my spam score increased. Please advice. Is there any special way to use that help moz crawler to check site and update accordingly? Please help
Technical SEO | | AzadSeo37310 -
Linking to my Site so I should Link Back?
I remember hearing a few years ago that it was a good practice to link back to a site that was linking to you. My company's site was referenced and linked to in a news article. The news company has an above average domain authority, which is pretty good for my company's backlink profile. Is it still or was ever a "best practice" to link back to this website/domain? I feel like linking back was a best practice, but when I try to search this, all I get back is backlinking 101 and backlinking articles. Nothing really answering my question straight forward. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | aua0 -
New site - http or https?
Hi. We are currently in the process of creating a new website. We will be using our old domain name. However, the current website is currently live on both http and https protocols, with no re-directs in place. When we launch the new website, we would like to redirect everything to one or the other. Would the preference be to use https as the preferred protocol?
Technical SEO | | Lexica0 -
Squidoo vs Personal Site
Hey guys I'm Nikolas a newb, just signed up to the pro membership trial after alot of digging on the seomoz blog for months . First off let me tell you alittle about my story and seo knowledge. I started off online on the well known squidoo site with revenue sharing, because of my day job I had alot of time to work on my articles and build up to a nice monthly salary of just over 1k in less than 5 months which doubled and trippled in the last few months. Seo is like a 6th sense to me , onpage offpage and the lots. Most of what I read here is not new to me or something I didn't already know about, but its good to freshen up and remember things, as theres alot to search engine optimization. I have built up to over 500k unique visitors in less than a year and have decided to move on to my own site 4 months ago. The niche is the exact same one I have targeted on squidoo. My site had alot of issues at the start the classic 301 redirection ht_access fix I had to do,content management system building low quality content pages via tags that i have fixed(noindex) and removed with 404s, build up original unique valuable posts, interlink ,onpage and offpage seo the basics I did for squidoo. The problem here is that I can't seem to get any traction from google where as my squidoo search engine traffic is 80% , my sites google traffic is 5-10%. I have the same number of articles on both sites, similar topics , similar onpage offpage optimisation basically identical but have alot better content on my new site. My bing, yahoo and referral traffic is rising everyday but as I know google is 85% of the market share I am leaving alot of money on the table. I hope that most of you more dedicated seo's can give me a tip or two and explain exactly what is going on with my situation and if possible take a look at my site hardwarepal .
Technical SEO | | NikolasNikolaou0 -
Two sites
Hi there just joined had nightmere of a time trying to get a website up and running..... now i have 2 .... one marketing person did and one i did the one i did performing better on google but other onre looks more profetional is there a way i can conbine the 2 under one site..... the one that looks better and getting the benifit of the one thats performing better...... Thanks steve......
Technical SEO | | stevetemple0 -
On-site adjustment opinions
Hi folks, I've got a fairly interesting scenario. I'm trying to rank this page (http://www.staysa.co.za/sa/1-2-0-0-1/East-London/accommodation) better for the term, "accommodation east london". The client isn't keen on making many changes and it was built horribly with ASP, half CMS, half not. I have made the following changes today: I introduced two paragraphs of text below the H1 tag. I changed "East London Bed and Breakfast", "East London Conference Venues", "East London Cottage / Chalet" to just "Bed and Breakfast", "Conference Venues", "Cottage / Chalet" as the continual key phrase duplication in my experience is a bad move. I've made a change to the title tag (this is a huge mission as it's not CMS controlled, so I had to teach myself some basic ASP to do so). Meta data.. nightmare to change unfortunately, at least not without rewriting part of the CMS. I'm wondering, are there any other on-site factors that I'm missing? I'm not a fan of site-wide links, so I don't want to put an exact match anchor text link from the sidebar/footer to the page, not unless someone can motivate why I should. Keen to hear everyone's opinions 🙂
Technical SEO | | ChristopherM0 -
Parameter Handling - Nourls Question
We're trying to make sense of Google's new parameter handling options and I seem unable to find a good answer to an issue regarding the NoUrl option. For ex. we have two Urls pointing to the same content: http://www.propertyshark.com/mason/ny/New-York-City/Maps/Manhattan-Apartment-Sales-Map?zoom=1&x=0.518&y=0.3965 http://www.propertyshark.com/mason/ny/New-York-City/Maps/Manhattan-Apartment-Sales-Map?zoom=2&x=0.518&y=0.3965 Ideally, I would want Google to index only the main Url without any parameters, so http://www.propertyshark.com/mason/ny/New-York-City/Maps/Manhattan-Apartment-Sales-Map To do this, I would set the value No Urls for the zoom, x and y parameters. By doing this do we still get any SEO value from back links that point to the URLs with the parameters, or will Google just ignore them?
Technical SEO | | propertyshark0 -
Index forum sites
Hi Moz Team, somehow the last question i raised a few days ago not only wasnt answered up until now, it was also completely deleted and the credit was not "refunded" - obviously there was some data loss involved with your restructuring. Can you check whether you still find the last question and answer it quickly? I need the answer 🙂 Here is one more question: I bought a website that has a huge forum, loads of pages with user generated content. Overall around 500.000 Threads with 9 Million comments. The complete forum is noindex/nofollow when i bought the site, now i am thinking about what is the best way to unleash the potential. The current system is vBulletin 3.6.10. a) Shall i first do an update of vbulletin to version 4 and use the vSEO tool to make the URLs clean, more user and search engine friendly before i switch to index/follow? b) would you recommend to have the forum in the folder structure or on a subdomain? As far as i know subdomain does take lesser strenght from the TLD, however, it is safer because the subdomain is seen as a separate entity from the regular TLD. Having it in he folder makes it easiert to pass strenght from the TLD to the forum, however, it puts my TLD at risk c) Would you release all forum sites at once or section by section? I think section by section looks rather unnatural not only to search engines but also to users, however, i am afraid of blasting more than a millionpages into the index at once. d) Would you index the first page of a threat or all pages of a threat? I fear duplicate content as the different pages of the threat contain different body content but the same Title and possibly the same h1. Looking forward to hear from you soon! Best Fabian
Technical SEO | | fabiank0