Combining Two Sites With Similar Domain Authority
-
Hello,
We run two sites with the same product, product descriptions and url structure. Essentially, the two sites are the same except for domain name and minor differences on the home pages. We've run this way for quite a few years. Both sites have a domain authority of 48 and there are not a large number of duplicate incoming links.
I understand the "book" to say we should combine the sites with 301's to the similar pages. I am concerned about doing this because "site 2" still does about 20% of our business.
We have been losing organic traffic for a number of years. I think this mainly has to do with a more competitive environment. However, where google used to serve both our sites for a search term it now will only show one.
How much organic benefit should we see if we combine. Will it be significant enough to merge the two sites. Understandably, I realize the future can't be predicted but I would like to know if anyone has had a similar experience or opinion
Thanks
-
I think that there is a good chance for an increase of total sales by combining the sites. I vote for this because the two sites have diverse link profiles and combining them will make a big gain in the link diversity and domain authority of the site that remains. I would merge them with optimism rather than with fear.
-
Google doesn't tend to like 'clone' sites and if it detects them, one of the web properties will be nerfed. Google wants people to 'add value' to the web, and then reward them with traffic. The path is not supposed to be, build one site - clone it, get double the traffic. This is also to keep Google's search results diverse
Seriously, how annoying would it be if you searched for something and every link was the same site with a different name?
In situations where you gained extra traffic illegitimately, there's not much that you can do (technically or otherwise) to re-capture the traffic that you shouldn't have been getting in the first place.
If I were you, I'd be looking at this decision more in terms of: "this will help to plug a gap and stop further deterioration". If Google think you have been gaining traffic that you shouldn't have been getting, fixing the problem won't cause Google to give you 'bonus points' that see your site(s) return to illegitimate traffic levels
If you are looking for quick and easy ways to succeed in SEO, know that the lifespan of such techniques is limited. In actual fact, you're lucky not to have received a penalty on both sites.
This is not a case of "how can I make some quick traffic again", it's a case of "how can I demonstrate to Google that my behavior is changing, and avoid a penalty for my main site". Sometimes the benefit, is NOT losing everything you have!
Darin Pirkey made some good points, but I don't think it's a case of 'the benefits of moving outweigh the risks of leaving it'. My POV is very similar but slightly different. I think that 'the risks of leaving it as it is are greater than the risks of merging the web properties' (but then... I'm a bit of a cynic)
-
I think you are already seeing that Google is treating these two as the same. I've had this issue with a legal blog and a lawyers main website. We took the blog from it's own domain and put it under the main lawyer website. We did see a dip in traffic for about two months but it quickly recovered and we ended up with more traffic as the overall site seemed to be more authoritative under one roof.
During this merge, I would also check for "thin content" and/or content that is no longer relevant and/or getting traffic. We tend to use the opportunity as a sort of spring cleaning of the site. But, since your sites are pretty identical, a good thorough examination of all the content on both would be beneficial. Make sure you map the "old" site and keep a sitemap just in case something goes wrong. We used a Google Sheet/ Excel to map domains so in the event something went wrong with the the 301's, we had the opportunity to correct everything.
I know there are risks with moving the domain, but I think the positives outweigh them by a long shot.
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
-
Will using a reverse proxy give me the benefits of the main sites domain authority?
If I am running example.com and have a blog on exampleblog.com Will moving the blog to example.com/blog and using a reverse proxy give the blog the same domain authority as example.com Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | El-Bracko0 -
Redirecting an Entire Site to a Page on Another Site?
So I have a site that I want to shut down http://vowrenewalsmaui.com and redirect to a dedicated Vow Renewals page I am making on this site here: https://simplemauiwedding.net. My main question is: I don't want to lose all the authority of the pages and if I just redirect the site using my domain registrar's 301 redirect it will only redirect the main URL not all of the supporting pages, to my knowledge. How do I not lose all the authority of the supporting pages and still shut down the site and close down my site builder? I know if I leave the site up I can redirect all of the individual pages to corresponding pages on the other site, but I want to be done with it. Just trying to figure out if there is a better way than I know of. The domain is hosted through GoDaddy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | photoseo10 -
Switching URLs after acquisition to retain domain authority?
Hey everyone! My company just acquired our biggest competitor and we're switching to their platform because they have a better technical structure for SEO--what's the best way to do that, other than a 301 redirect? Can we even rename their domain to ours? How do we ensure we keep both our and their domain authority and SEO juice? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | genevieveagar0 -
I have rebuilt a website on a new domain and followed SEO protocol to maintain authority, but the results and rankings are declining.
We took over an account for a company called knightdoorservices.com who specialize in doors and windows in Edmonton, Alberta. We built them a new website on a new domain: knightdoorsandwindows.com. We did 301 redirects on all of the old URLs so that they now point to the new URLs so most of the authority should transfer over. Additionally, each page has a properly optimized title, h1 tag, a series of pertinent alt tags, and many instances of the focus keyword for that particular page. Additionally, the website loads quickly and has many high authority inbound links pointing to the domain. We have done this for many other companies and have seen their rankings maintain their position or increase. Is there something that I am missing for this company in particular? Thanks so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Web3Marketing870 -
Duplicate site (disaster recovery) being crawled and creating two indexed search results
I have a primary domain, toptable.co.uk, and a disaster recovery site for this primary domain named uk-www.gtm.opentable.com. In the event of a disaster, toptable.co.uk would get CNAMEd (DNS alias) to the .gtm site. Naturally the .gtm disaster recover domian is an exact match to the toptable.co.uk domain. Unfortunately, Google has crawled the uk-www.gtm.opentable site, and it's showing up in search results. In most cases the gtm urls don't get redirected to toptable they actually appear as an entirely separate domain to the user. The strong feeling is that this duplicate content is hurting toptable.co.uk, especially as .gtm.ot is part of the .opentable.com domain which has significant authority. So we need a way of stopping Google from crawling gtm. There seem to be two potential fixes. Which is best for this case? use the robots.txt to block Google from crawling the .gtm site 2) canonicalize the the gtm urls to toptable.co.uk In general Google seems to recommend a canonical change but in this special case it seems robot.txt change could be best. Thanks in advance to the SEOmoz community!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OpenTable0 -
Google penalized site--307/302 redirect to new site-- Via intermediate link—New Site Ranking Gone..?
Hi, I have a site that google had placed a manual link penalty on, let’s call this our
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robdob2013
company site. We tried and tried to get the penalty removed, and finally gave up and purchased another name. It was our understanding that we could safely use either a 302 or 307 temporary redirect in order to redirect people from our old domain to our new one.. We put this into place several months and everything seemed to be going along well. Several days ago I noticed that our root domain name had dropped for our selected keyword from position 9 to position 65. Upon looking into our GWT under “Links to Your site” , I have found many, many, many links which were pointed to our old google penalized domain name to our new root domain name each of this links had a sub heading “Via this intermediate link -> Our Old Domain Google Penalized Domain Name” In light of all of this going on, I have removed the 307/302 redirect, have brought the
old penalized site back which now consists of a basic “we’ve moved page” which is linked to our new site using a rel=’nofollow’ I am hoping that -1- Our new domain has probably not received a manual penalty and is most likely now
received some sort of algorithmic penalty, and that as these “intermediate links” will soon disappear because I’m no longer doing the 302/307 from the old sight to the new. Do you think this is the case now or that I now have a new manual penalty place on the new
domain name.. I would very much appreciate any comments and/or suggestions as to what I should or can do to get this fixed. I need to still keep the old domain name as this address has already been printed on business cards many, many years ago.. Also on a side note some of the sub pages of the new root domain are still ranking very
well, it’s only the root domain that is now racking awfully.. Thanks,0 -
Optimal site structure for travel site
Hi there, I am seo-managing a travel website where we are going to make a new site structure next year. We have about 4000 pages on the site at the moment. The structure is only 2-levels at the moment: Level 1: Homepage Level 2: All other pages (4000 individual pages - (all with different urls)) We are adding another 2-3 levels, but we have a challenge: We have potentially 2 roads to the same product (e.g. "phuket diving product") domain.com/thailand/activities/diving/phuket-diving-product.asp domain.com/activities/diving/thailand/phuket-diving-product.asp I would very much appreciate your view on the problem: How do I solve this dilemma/challenge from a SEO standpoint? I want to avoid DC if possible, I also only want one landing page - for many reasons. And usability is of course also very important. Best regards, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sembseo0 -
Move blog from subdomain to main domain on ecom site?
I am wondering what my fellow mozers think. Pretty set about my direction but want to get any other input to aid in my decision. Have an ecom site with a www.blog.maindomain.com. The blog is fairly new and no major rankings. There are only about 30 posts. This isn't a super competitive market and the blogging won't be a huge part of our content strategy but I would like to use it for passing juice etc. Would you go through the trouble to move the blog to www.site.com/blog and redirecting all the old content to new?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises0