Merging Domains
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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?
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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
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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?
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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
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