Retaining rank when integrating with a larger site
-
Our client was just acquired by a larger company and they want to merge their 100-page website into the larger, parent company's 500+ page website. They currently have a strong ranking for a focused group of keywords and are worried about losing their ranking position for those important keywords. The keywords are roughly 80-90% of the focus of the old site, but will represent only 30-40% of the focus of the new site.
Will this move hurt their rankings? What can we advise them to do to retain the value of their current ranking strength for the target keywords?
-
Very helpful -- gives me some great perspective to start with. Thanks to both EGOL and Yannick for your responses.
-
Good tips from EGOL.
How does the bigger site on the keywords that the smaller site ranks for, rank?
If they don't rank for it period.... as in: not in the top 50 for those keywords, it's really no use to redirect the pages. Because probabluy their entire on page optimization is crap. So in the beginning all will be well. Search engines will just give the rankings to the bigger site, but they will drop because the new content and site structure cannot maintain the rankings.
-
Will this move hurt their rankings?
I am not going to guess.
If the larger website is authoritative and powerful this merger could be kickass - like uniting the clans.
However, if the larger website is weak, or spammy, or linking to bad neighborhoods, or inefficient... the power of the small site could be lost in the (abyss, mess, crap... select appropriate word).
If the larger site is nothing special my guess is that their rankings will drop as linkjuice and authority of the small site seeps into the larger mass of pages.
To be honest... for a given amount of power I prefer to fight with a small compact site rather than a large expansive one.
Bottom line... if the small site belonged to me and was making lots of money I would continue to enjoy it and not take the risk of change - and I would simply link from the large site to the small site to let visitors know that you have another property. Maybe the larger company has other allies who would be willing to do that too, thus making the small site even more powerful.
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
-
Indexed Pages Different when I perform a "site:Google.com" site search - why?
My client has an ecommerce website with approx. 300,000 URLs (a lot of these are parameters blocked by the spiders thru meta robots tag). There are 9,000 "true" URLs being submitted to Google Search Console, Google says they are indexing 8,000 of them. Here's the weird part - When I do a "site:website" function search in Google, it says Google is indexing 2.2 million pages on the URL, but I am unable to view past page 14 of the SERPs. It just stops showing results and I don't even get a "the next results are duplicate results" message." What is happening? Why does Google say they are indexing 2.2 million URLs, but then won't show me more than 140 pages they are indexing? Thank you so much for your help, I tried looking for the answer and I know this is the best place to ask!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
Not Ranking - Any Tips?
Hi guys, I have a client site that I've recently come onboard with that was published late last year, not really optimized for anything, and in a moderately, but not very, competitive, search space. Early April we optimized the home page and a couple of other pages and have since built about 5-6 (high quality, partial match) links to it, and a press release was done mid last month. The only other thing we did was change the site from non-www to www and set this as the preferred domain in Search Console. Over 6 weeks since that all began, and we're still not on the radar at all for any of our main keywords - nowhere. The only thing we are really ranking for is our brand name, but this is the wrong (press release, not home!) page, and it's bouncing a lot. All of the pages seem to be indexed, and we are ranking for one other (inconsequential) keyword, but 99 is the highest it has reached. An SEO friend told me to build some citations, but this is not a local business, nor are we trying to rank locally. Can anyone please suggest why it might be taking so long, and what else I could try? I imagine more links will help, but results from our outreach are hard to predict, so if there were another safe link type that could help me figure out whether this domain is in trouble or not ASAP, that would be ideal. Thanks very much in advance for any help you can provide. Ulla
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ullamalm0 -
Technical Site Questions
When i do a google cache of our site, i see 2 menus, our developers say that's because the 2nd is for the mobile menu - is that correct, as when i look up other sites that have mobile rendering they only have one menu visible. Plus GWT's has the number of internal links per page at least x2 what they should have - are they connected? Secondly when i do a spider test through http://tools.seobook.com/general/spider-test/ it shows all "behind the scenes text" eg font names, portals, sliders, margins - "font size px" is shown as 17 times and a density of 2.15% - surely this isnt correct as google will be thinking that these are my keywords !? My site is www.over50choices.co.uk Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Bing and Yahoo Ranks work, google ranks not happening
Bing and Yahoo Ranks work, google ranks not happening please help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Djdealeyo0 -
Page Rank
Hi guys I have an ecommerce in prestashop (unfortunatelly I can not change it at this moment). I made all main activities both off and on the page. And actually it is working pretty well since I am up on the SERP for all the target keywords. BUT, the page rank still be 0. The site is about 2 years old. My main competitor has the same domain authority than mine, but he has a page rank > 0 Moreover I have more quality links then it has, but it is older Any suggestions? Many thanks Ciao Diego
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrelax0 -
It appears that Googlebot Mobile will look for mobile redirects from the desktop site, but still use the SEO from the desktop site.
Is the above statement correct? I've read that its better to have different SEO titles & descriptions for mobile sites as users search differently on mobile devices. I've also read it's good to link build, keep text content on mobile sites etc to get the mobile site to rank. If I choose to not have titles & descriptions on my mobile site will Google just rank our desktop version & then redirect a user on a mobile device to our mobile site or should I be adding in titles & descriptions into the mobile site? Thanks so much for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Is Google taking longer to rank new sites?
We run a lot of "niche blogs" and websites focused on fairly non-competitive keywords. At the start of the year, we used to be able to put up websites and be able to achieve almost instant rankings on these sites. However, recently, it seems to be taking a lot longer for these sites to rank. It also seems to be taking longer for Google to index links. Is this a recent change in Google to protect against spam and help filter out the lower quality sites? Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840 -
Blog - on the domain or place on separate site, now that Panda ranks for bounce, TOP, depth of visit
Over 10 years ago, we decided to run our blog external to our main website. contrary to conventional wisdom then, we thought we’d have more control/opps for generating external anchor text links, plus working in a bona fide blog software environment (WP). As we had hoped, the blog generated alot of strong inbound links, captured inbound links of it own from other sites and I think, helped improve our SERPs and traffic. Once the blog was established and with the redesign of the website, we capitulated, and finally moved the blog onto the main domain. After reading a number of pieces on Panda and the new reality of SEO, sounds like bounce rates (in particular), time on page, and other GA measures may have a more profound influence on google rankings now. Given that blogs are notoriously for high bounce rates (ours is), low time on site, depth of visit, seems logical that it adversely affects our site averages for the main domain). Is it time to re-consider pulling our blog off the main domain to reassert the ‘true’ GA measures of the main domain? I guess it still gets down to the question... is the advantage of all the inbound links to the blog on the main domain of greater value than moving the blog off-site and reasserting better 'site stats' for google's pando algo? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ahw0