Ecommerce website consolidation
-
I have a large ecommerce site and several smaller nitche ecommerce sites. All have the same products, but the smaller sites are loosing traffic.
I want to combine all the sites to the larger site so it will be easier to manage, but I don't want to loose any rank on the smaller sites.
Example:
www.yourpromopeople.com - This is the large site I want to use.
www.fourcolormagnets.com - These are a couple of the smaller sites I want to combine with the larger one.
Questions:
What are the pros and cons in doing this?
What would be the best way to do this?
Would redirecting the URL's to the larger site's product pages do the trick or is there a better option?
Thanks for the help.
-
Thanks, That's what I was looking for.
-
Hi,
Consolidating sites for manageability and traffic is often a good decision, we did it with some of our smaller sites and saw some good successes with it.
The pros are, as i see it;
- Easy to manage the sites content (if you have an easy to use cm system on the main site)
- Generating unique content for 1 site is easy than generating content for several site and will hopefully lead to a situation where the main site is seen as an authority.
- Consolidation of your traffic should make it easier to target the keywords you know are performing well for you as opposed to having to pull from several different analytics sources
- With your site being transactional it might be easier for you to manage orders on one site than on several depending on how your back end system works?
Cons would be largely around the potential loss of traffic, having gone through a similar consolidation process I think it is best to assume you will save around 85% of your search results, although reports differ on this one. Once you make the switch, you will see an initial drop in traffic but should recover if done correctly.
There are a number of steps involved in doing this effectively:
- Ascertain which of your keywords, and consequently pages, are vital for you to keep. You can do this easily with the keyword/content reports in google analytics.
- I would put in place individual 301s on these pages pointing to most relevant pages on your main site. From experience I would suggest leaving these 301s in place until you start seeing the positions in the SERPs change over to your new results.
- It's probably worth running an OSE report and double checking of any of the external links you have to your smaller sites can be altered to point at the new one - this will probably be more efficient than the 301s.
- Having protected the main pages start focusing on the rest of the pages on your sites. Don't do a blanket 301 as you'll end up with a bunch of 404s from the pages you miss. It'll take much longer to do this page by page but it'll be worth it in the end.
- Finally, in the webmaster accounts of each of your sites there is the option to inform google that your site has moved. Once you're happy with the 301s for each of the smaller sites.
Just a few tips here, more focused on moving one site over to a new domain, but should definitely be considered for a site consolidation too. The google article on moving domains will also be helpful as well:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105
Nice little Moz bit on redirections here too if you're not so comfortable with them: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
Thanks,
Nigel
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
-
Staging website got indexed by google
Our staging website got indexed by google and now MOZ is showing all inbound links from staging site, how should i remove those links and make it no index. Note- we already added Meta NOINDEX in head tag
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Asmi-Ta0 -
SEO QA automation of large websites
Can you share your experiences in managing SEO QA automation of large websites with millions of pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | terentyev
what are the things you are regularly testing for, besides the most obvious - hreflangs/canonicals, robots.txt, sitemap, non-200 status codes, redirect rules?
do you use in-house developed tools or external tools?
if external - which ones?
how do you run your QA automation scripts? external server or some online tools? upon every release or hourly/daily/monthly?0 -
How should I setup schema.org for ecommerce site?
I understand how to do products, what I am more curious about is the organization schema. Is it worth it to set it up as an ecommerce business? I would have to set it up on the About Us page for the site, does it matter to Google that it is not located on the homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Can I use the old website content on the new website, after deleting it from the server?
My website nowwhatstudio.com hit by google pure spam and google applied manual spam action to the website. I create new website (nowwhatmoments.com) with the same content from the old spam action website (nowwhatstudio.com). As google removed my old website content from search indexed. Can I use the same content for a new website? If I delete my old website from the server, after that Can I use the old website content for a new website? Or Can make edits the old website content and make it 80% original for a new website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward0 -
Website Migration and SEO
Recently I migrated three websites from www.product.com to www.brandname.com/product. Two of these site are performing as normal when it comes to SEO but one of them lost half of its traffic and dropped in rankings significantly. All pages have been properly redirected, onsite SEO is intact and optimized, and all pages are indexed by Search engines. Has anyone had experience with this type of migration that could give some input on what a possible solution could be? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexVelazquez0 -
Scarce niche websites for link building
Hello! A small company from Mexico that offers cleaning services for home & businesses wants to rank on the first page of Google. The Good: Every month they give away stuff (discounts and/or a free service) and they also participate in campaigns that support non-profitable organizations & charity. So there is plenty of material for me to build some backlinks and to create some interesting content. Their competitors have 0 SEO. I have been doing my homework and none of their competitors websites that are ranking on the top 5 are doing any kind of SEO. But they have had their website for a long time and they probably have a decent amount of traffic per day. Open Site Explorer shows minimal to no websites pointing to them. Google Adwords has increased their sales. They are using virtually nothing as budget and it is helping, but they want organic SEO. The Bad: Blogs seem to be dead in Mexico. And that is one of my strongest ways to create backlinks. I usually get a blogger to write about the company I'm working for to create backlinks and works like a charm in countries were SEO is prehistoric. Usually it takes me very little effort to accomplish a website to rank very well in this kind of scenario, but I'm having trouble this time. The Something: I have been able to boost their rankings with basic SEO in a month but I'm stuck in page #2-5 on their most important keywords. The Ugly: I'm out of ideas. And their budget isn't good enough to apply paid strategies. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eblan0 -
Content Marketing: Should we build a separate website or built in site within the Website itself?
Hi Mozzers, Client: Big carpet cleaner player in the carpet cleaning industry Main Goal: Creating good content to Get more organic traffic to our main site Structure of the extra content: It will act like a blog but will be differentiated from the regular site by not selling anything but just creating good content. The look and design will be different from the client's site. SEO question: In terms of SEO, what would be the most beneficial for us to do, should we built in this new section/site outside or inside the client's site? I personally think that it should be separated from the main site because of the main reasons: A followed link to the main site Anchor texts implementation linking back to our service pages If we would to choose to build in this content, it would be highly beneficial for getting organic traffic within the main site but I am afraid this will not provide us any link juice since anchor texts won't be accounted the same since all of those would be located in the Nav bar of the main site. Can someone tell me what would be the best in terms of SEO? P.S: My boss doesn't agree with me and would rather go the second option (build in within the main site) that's why i am asking you guys what would be the most beneficial? Thank you Guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Duplicate Content http://www.website.com and http://website.com
I'm getting duplicate content warnings for my site because the same pages are getting crawled twice? Once with http://www.website.com and once with http://website.com. I'm assuming this is a .htaccess problem so I'll post what mine looks like. I think installing WordPress in the root domain changed some of the settings I had before. My main site is primarily in HTML with a blog at http://www.website.com/blog/post-name BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thirdseo
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress0