Website(s) Merge Questions
-
Hello Moz Community
I have three separate websites that I have planned on merging into one. I recently acquired a strong domain ( stronger than my existing ones ) & after much deliberation, I have decided to move them together into one domain.
Site 1) 1 Forum - Around since 2007 - Originally VBulletin, last year migrated to discourse.
Site 2) E-commercece Magento Site - Around since 2010
Site 3) WordPress - Blog & Articles - Around since last year - Currently using the new ( Main Domain I want to use )
After a lot of research and White Board Fridays, I was thinking this would be my best bet:
- newdomain.com - Merged WordPress & Magento CMS Page.
- newdomain.com/ forum <-- Will move my forum content & Install to the new domain.
- newdomain.com/ store <-- Will move my Ecommerce content & Install.
Between my developer and I, we have our heads around how to handle the technical aspect of the move, 301s to the new location etc.
But one area we want to research before pulling the trigger ( we haven't found much data on this )
**My Main Question:**What is the possible penalty coming for shopping websites vs. content-driven websites, and possibility that forum-based content hosted on the same domain might cause another penalty to be applied to the other content on the domain.
**My Developer Says:**In recent years, we noticed that forum content had been penalized in favor of editorially reviewed content when this is identified by search engines.
What big hiccups would / could we encounter from combining these 3 types of platforms into one site?Many thanks for any direction or insight. -
Thank you very much, I greatly appreciate the response. Any other feedback from is welcome.
Thank you!
-
For your "main question": I think the chances of this are slim if you maintain a quality site. Content review and moderation should be enforced in the forum to avoid any types of issues with low quality UGC... the migration is a good time to review the content you are copying over.
Regarding what your developer says, yes there is some risk of issues because of the forum, but if you do a good job moderating this shouldn't be any type of issue. Lastly, I wouldn't expect any type of "penalty" carrying over to the other sections of your site as G has gotten pretty decent lately at separating wheat from chaff when assessing site quality.
As a suggestion: I would set-up each of those subfolders independently within GSC so you can monitor for any traffic/impression fluctuations, higher profile pages, etc. independently.
-Jake Bohall
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
-
Why DA of my website is not increasing
Hi, Everyone.
Technical SEO | | Lauragabriel
I hope you are well So my question about Moz DA. I would like to ask that I have increased the content on my website which is related to Best Machete. I've done all the things that Google asks us to do for ranking and I'm avoiding wrongdoing. So what else do I need to do to increase Moz DA of my website?
So Please, If any one know also guide me, I would be grateful to him/her.0 -
Mobile website indexing
Hi we have a mobile version of our website at mobile.gardening-services-edinburgh.com its been live for 5, maybe 6 months, it has its own mobile-sitemap.xml have tried submitting this sitemap to google and for some reason it does not index these pages any ideas, most welcome
Technical SEO | | McSEO0 -
Suggestions on Website Recovery
Hello Mozzers! I have been tasked with recovering a site from partial link penalty that was previous brought to my attention for this website www.active8canada.com. Upon reviewing the site backlinks and reporting info in Google webmaster tools, I found there was no penalty showing, could it have expired? We spent the last few months doing link cleanup as we recognize that there was some bad links that needed to be addressed. We requested removal of all the bad links after spending time categorizing all of them. Targeting commercial anchor text and bringing those numbers back to acceptable levels. Following this we did a disavow of the bad links which could not be removed through requests. We are actively building out additional content for the website as we recognize that some pages have thin content. We have earned some links as well to show some positive signals during the cleanup but have seen no change for better or worse. My question is, does anyone else see anything else we could be missing here? Should I revisit links again? Some of the links we disavowed are still showing in our backlink reports, but I cross referenced our disavows with the existing backlink profile to try and get an accurate sense of the remaining links. We never saw a decline in ranks further after the disavow, so I'm lead to believe that the links we removed had little, if any impact. I am a little hesitant to begin earning new links through content and partnership outreach as I still feel something is off that I can't quite put my finger on. It was previously confirmed that there was a penalty, but without that showing now in Google webmaster tools I'm grasping at any possible angle I may have missed. If anyone had a couple minutes to spare to shed some light on this situation, it would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | toddmumford0 -
Website not ranking for noncompetitive terms
Hi, We've took over a website last July and no matter what we do we just can't get it ranking in Google, even for noncompetitive terms. here is the website in question: http://www.alignandsmile.co.uk Ideally the client would like to rank for Canary Wharf but that location is competitive, the site doesn't even rank for 'Dentist New Providence Wharf E14' despite it being included in the title tag on the home page and in the content throughout the website. Directories with Align and Smile's business information do rank however. I opened a case with google through Webmaster tools and they 'reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google.' So I'm a bit stuck. The site ranks top for the keyphrase in Bing and Yahoo...we are really struggling with Google! Any help would be much appreciated. many thanks Marcus
Technical SEO | | dentaldesign0 -
Just read Travis Loncar's YouMoz post and I have a question about Pagination
This was a brilliant post. I have a question about Pagination on sites that are opting to use Google Custom Search. Here is an example of a search results page from one of the sites I work on: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/search-return?q=countryman I notice in the source code of sequential pages that the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags are not used. I also noticed that the URL does not change when clicking on the numbers for the subsequent pages of the search results. Also, the canonical tag of every subsequent page looks like this: Are you thinking what I'm thinking? All of our Google Custom Search pages have the same canonical tag....Something's telling me this just can't be good. Questions: 1. Is this creating a duplicate content issue? 2. If we need to include rel="prev" and rel="next" on Google Custom Search pages as well as make the canonical tag accurate, what is the best way to implement this? Given that searchers type in such a huge range of search terms, it seems that the canonical tags would have to be somehow dynamically generated. Or, (best case scenario!) am I completely over-thinking this and it just doesn't matter on dynamically driven search results pages? Thanks in advance for any comments, help, etc.
Technical SEO | | danatanseo1 -
301 Redirect Question
I'm working on a site that has a lot of indexed pages and backlinks to both domain.com and www.domain.com. Will using a 301 redirect to send domain.com to www.domain.com merge all of the indexed pages and links over to www.domain.com, thereby strengthening the www?
Technical SEO | | Yo_Adrian0 -
URL Structure Question
Hey folks, I have a weird problem and currently no idea how to fix it. We have a lot of pages showing up as duplicates although they are the same page, the only difference is the url structure. They seem to show up like: http://www.example.com/page/ and http://www.example.com/page What would I need to do to force the URLs into one format or the other to avoid having that one page counting as two? The same issue pops up with upper and lower case: http://www.example.com/Page and http://www.example.com/page Is there any solution to this or would I need to forward them with 301s or similar? Thanks, Mike
Technical SEO | | Malarowski0 -
Question about Hm Pg Redirects
This question is for MichaelC who was helping me with a previous question that is now closed. Please refer to my question with Subject "Double 301 Redirect" It was about redirecting /home.aspx to simply "/" because that was an old URL and we have some backlinks pointing to it. If the best I could do is redirect "/home.aspx" to something like "#hm", would that work, since everything after the hash symbol is ignored? Thanks Clint
Technical SEO | | poolguy0