Merging sites, ensuring traffic doesn't die
-
Wondering if I could get a second opinion on this, please. I have just taken on a new client, they own about 6 different niched car experience websites (hire an Aston Martin for the day, type thing). All the six sites they have seem to perform reasonably well for the brand of car they deal with, the average DA of the sites is about 24.
The client wishes to move all of these different manufacturers into one site and have sections of the site, they can then also target more generic experience day type keywords.
The obvious way of dealing with this move would be to 301 the old sites to the relevant places on the new site and wait for that to rank. However, looking at the backlinks profile of the niched sites, they seem to have very few backlinks and i feel the reason they are ranking so well for all the individual manufacturers is because they all feature the name in the domain. Not exact match, but the name is there.
If I am thinking right, with the 301 we want to tell Google page x is now page y, index this one instead. Because the new site has a more generic name I don't think it will enjoy any of the domain keyword benefits which are helping the sub sites, and as a result I expect the rankings and traffic to drop (at least in the short term).
Am I reading this correct. Would people use a 301 in this case? The easiest thing to do would be to leave the 6 sub sites up and running on their own domain and launch the new site to run alongside them, however the client doesn't want this.
Thanks,
Carl
-
I have had a lot of success using internal landing pages that are targeted to a single topic. For your client, their homepage might be rentaluxurycar.com that is more general in its content; but then have individual pages that are focused on each make and model, i.e. rentaluxurycar.com/astmonmartindb7, with keywords focused on renting a DB7.
I would also push the client on letting the six subsites run alongside the main site. If they have different domains and unique content, then they can crowd the search results.
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
-
If I'm using a compressed sitemap (sitemap.xml.gz) that's the URL that gets submitted to webmaster tools, correct?
I just want to verify that if a compressed sitemap file is being used, then the URL that gets submitted to Google, Bing, etc and the URL that's used in the robots.txt indicates that it's a compressed file. For example, "sitemap.xml.gz" -- thanks!
Technical SEO | | jgresalfi0 -
Help Setting Up 301 Redirects from Coldfusion Site to Wordpress Site.
I have created a new website and need to redirect all of the previous pages to the new one. The old website was built in coldfusion and the new site is built in wordpress. One of the pages I'm trying to redirect is www.norriseal.com/products.cfm to http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/. This is what I have in my .htaccess file <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymlinks
Technical SEO | | MarketHubb
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect 301 /products.cfm http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/</ifmodule> The result of this redirect is http://norrisealwellmark.com/products.cfm How do I prevent the .cfm from appending to the destination URL?1 -
Do I submit a sitemap for a highly dynamic site or not? If so, what's the best way to go about doing it?
I do SEO for online boutique marketplace. I've been here for about 4 weeks and no one's done there SEO (they've been around for about 5 years), so there's lots to do. A big concern is whether or not to submit a sitemap, and if I do submit one, what's the best way to go about doing one.
Technical SEO | | Jane.com0 -
Why can't I rank for my brand name?
We are soon to launch a new company in New Zealand called Zing. I have been tasked with the challenge of ranking as highly as possible for anything to do with Zing before launch in February. Zing is in the financial industry so my colleagues thought that it would be a good idea to make a small blog (very small with literally one post) that reviewed other financial lenders. This sight stayed online for a couple of months before it was replaced. The official website is still yet to launch, so as an in between, I asked that we make a splash page with a small competition on it (see here at zing.co.nz). I would have preferred there were more keywords on the website but this was not achieved. I am still pushing for this and am hoping to get a few pages on there in the near future. Instead of getting the keywords on the splash page, I was given permission to start a subdomain, (blog.zing.co.nz). This contains many more common search terms and although its not quite doing the job I would like, the rankings for Zing have started to increase. At the moment, we are ranking number 1 for a few brand related keywords such as zing loans. This is why I feel something is wrong, because we rank number 1 for over 10 similar terms but yet we DO NOT EVEN APPEAR on the search engines at all for Zing. Have we been penalized? Do you have any suggestions at all? Do you think we could have been penalized for the first average blog? Maybe I messed up the swap over? Any help would be hugely appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Startupfactory0 -
Sitemap issue? 404's & 500's are regenerating?
I am using the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to generate a sitemap on http://www.atozqualityfencing.com. Last month, I had an associate create redirects for over 200 404 errors. She did this via the .htaccess file. Today, there are the same amount of 404s along with a number of 503 errors. This new Wordpress website was constructed on a subdirectory and made live by simply entering some code into the .htaccess file in order to direct browsers to the content we wanted live. In other words, the content actually resides in a subdirectory titled "newsite" but is shown live on the main url. Can you tell me why we are having these 404 & 503 errors? I have no idea where to begin looking.
Technical SEO | | JanetJ0 -
'External nofollow' in a robots meta tag? (advertorial links)
I believe this has never worked? It'd be an easy way of preventing any penalties from Google's recent crackdown on paid links via advertorials. When it's not possible to nofollow each external link individually, what are people doing? Nofollowing and/or noindexing the whole page?
Technical SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Why is the report telling I have duplicate content for 'www' and No subdomain?
i am getting duplicate content for most of my pages. when i look into in your reports the 'www' and 'no subdomian' are the culprit. How can I resolve this as the www.domain.com/page and domain.com/page are the same page
Technical SEO | | cpisano0 -
What are the pros and cons of moving one site onto a subdomain of another site?
Two sites. One has weaker sales. What would the benefits and problems for SEO of moving the weak site from its own domain to a subdomain of the stronger site?
Technical SEO | | GriffinHansen0