Merging Domains
-
Up until last week, we had separate domains for each of our 3 products. We've now merged two products to sit under one URL.
The merge coincided with a CMS upgrade which effectively killed all of our old URLs save for the homepage.
Is it best for me to 301 the old homepage to it's new place, as well as the rest of the old site's top pages to according pages on the new site? Or is there a better solution?
-
Right on.
Whenever you make big changes to the structure of your site (or in the case, completely taking your site down), you can choose to submit a new sitemap to Google. This is more or less a "heads-up" to Google that things have changed on your site and to recrawl/index it when available. It does not mean that Google will go ahead and crawl/index things right away, more of a "friendly reminder".
Your 301 redirects will immediately work if someone sees your old site in the SERPs and clicks on it, so you will be safe there. Once Google recrawls your site, it will see the 301 and take note that it is a permanent redirect and slowly remove your old site from the SERPs.
You definitely can submit a sitemap listing all of the URLs that now have 301 redirects, omitting any of the URLs that are now "broken" or you are not 301-ing to the new site (if that makes sense).
Hope this helps.
Mike
-
Ah, thank you! We're merging one website into another. I didn't think about the sitemap. Should I submit a new sitemap for the site that's about to be absorbed?
-
Sounds like you have the right idea.
I am a little uncertain as to whether you are saying you are merging one website into another or merging 2 websites into a brand new URL - but essentially you will do the same thing - 301 redirect any of the old URLs that were driving traffic to your site OR were linked to by many other sites to the new URL.
You can use Open Site Explorer to find all of your highly linked to URLs on your old site and redirect those to the applicable pages on the new site.
Make sure to submit a new sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools once you have everything setup.
Hope this helps.
Mike
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
-
Incomplete Redirect for Domain Migration?
One year ago we migrated domain "X" to domain "Y". We did the proper redirects and used Google Search Console. Everything was done by the book. Now when we enter "Site: X" in Google about 650 results listing the old domain still come up. When clicked these redirect to the new domain. My SEO says that the old domain should not be indexed by Google, that these pages with the old domain should not appear. Is this in fact an incomplete domain migration? Our search traffic dropped considerably when we migrated the domain a year ago. My SEO thinks this may explain the drop. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
If I redirect a subdomain, does this affect the parent domain?
Hi I have a company for example: abc.com and they have a subdomain def.abc.com with a lot of errors. These errors i believe affect the parent domain abc.com. So my company would like to redirect the subdomain to another domain altogther ex: xyz.com Can i redirect the subdomain def.abc.com to another website domain? Would this affect the parent domain in a good or bad way? Or should i be using an external links to point to a new domain for the subdomain? Trying to think what's best for SEO and the parent domain. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crodriguez890 -
Can new domain extensions rank?
Hi Does anybody know if it's possible to get domains with extensions like .party or .world to rank? Even for high competitive keywords? Can they rank over .com?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeWU0 -
Domain Authority
Hi I wanted to find out if anyone knew how to discover why DA may have dropped? Ours has gone from 26 to 25 - I know it's not much, but I wanted to find the reason. One thing which happened was our developer company wiped redirects, which did impact rankings - would this also have affected domain authority or do I need to review our backlinks again? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
What are the effects of having Multiple Redirects for pages under the same domain
Dear Mozers, First of all let me wish you all a Very Happy, Prosperous, Healthy, Joyous & Successful New Year ! I'm trying to analyze one of the website's Web Hosting UK Com Ltd. and during this process I've had this question running through my mind. This project has been live since the year 2003 and since then there have be changes made to the website (obviously). There have also been new pages been added, the same way some new pages have even been over-written with changes in the url structures too. Now, coming back to the question, if I've have a particular url structure in the past when the site was debuted and until date the structure has been changes thrice (for example) with a 301 redirect to every back dated structure, WOULD it impact the sites performance SEOwise ? And let's say that there's hundreds of such redirections under the same domain, don't you think that after a period of time we should remove the past pages/urls from the server ? That'd certainly increase the 404 (page not found) errors, but that can be taken care of. How sensible would it be to keep redirecting the bots from one url to the other when they only visit a site for a short stipulated time? To make it simple let me explain it with a real life scenario. Say if I was staying a place A then switched to a different location in another county say B and then to C and so on, and finally got settled at a place G. When I move from one place to another, I place a note of the next destination I'm moving to so that any courier/mail etc. can be delivered to my current whereabouts. In such a case there's a less chance that the courier would travel all the destinations to deliver the package. Similarly, when a bot visits a domain and it finds multiple redirects, don't you think that it'd loose the efficiency in crawling the site? Ofcourse, imo. the redirects are important, BUT it should be there (in htaccess) for only a period of say 3-6 months. Once the search engine bots know about the latest pages, the past pages/redirects should be removed. What are your opinions about this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eukmark0 -
Domain Alias SEO
We have 5 domain alias of our existing sites
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unibiz
All 5 domain alias are domain alias of our main site. It means, all domain alias will have exactly same site and contents
Like Main domain: www.mywebsite.com
DomainAlias: www.myproduct.com, www.myproduct2.com, www.myproduc3.com
And if anybody will open our site www.myproduct.com, it will open same website which I have in primary site what can i do to rank all website without any penalty....i s there any way? This is domain alias of in hosting industry Thanks0 -
Do exact matter domain not matter anymore?
I need to buy a new domain and Im wondering if I should be looking at a exact matching domain or simply just some nice name. Did the last change from Google simply just lessen the importance of the exact matching domain or completely kill the importance of them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rrrobertsson0 -
Recovery during domain migration
On average, how long does it takes to recover 80% of the rankings if two high authority domains are combined without chaging any content? I totally understand that each domain is different and search engines can treat them differently but if all the steps are followed to the T what are the chances?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ninjamarketer1