Ecommerce website consolidation
-
I have a large ecommerce site and several smaller nitche ecommerce sites. All have the same products, but the smaller sites are loosing traffic.
I want to combine all the sites to the larger site so it will be easier to manage, but I don't want to loose any rank on the smaller sites.
Example:
www.yourpromopeople.com - This is the large site I want to use.
www.fourcolormagnets.com - These are a couple of the smaller sites I want to combine with the larger one.
Questions:
What are the pros and cons in doing this?
What would be the best way to do this?
Would redirecting the URL's to the larger site's product pages do the trick or is there a better option?
Thanks for the help.
-
Thanks, That's what I was looking for.
-
Hi,
Consolidating sites for manageability and traffic is often a good decision, we did it with some of our smaller sites and saw some good successes with it.
The pros are, as i see it;
- Easy to manage the sites content (if you have an easy to use cm system on the main site)
- Generating unique content for 1 site is easy than generating content for several site and will hopefully lead to a situation where the main site is seen as an authority.
- Consolidation of your traffic should make it easier to target the keywords you know are performing well for you as opposed to having to pull from several different analytics sources
- With your site being transactional it might be easier for you to manage orders on one site than on several depending on how your back end system works?
Cons would be largely around the potential loss of traffic, having gone through a similar consolidation process I think it is best to assume you will save around 85% of your search results, although reports differ on this one. Once you make the switch, you will see an initial drop in traffic but should recover if done correctly.
There are a number of steps involved in doing this effectively:
- Ascertain which of your keywords, and consequently pages, are vital for you to keep. You can do this easily with the keyword/content reports in google analytics.
- I would put in place individual 301s on these pages pointing to most relevant pages on your main site. From experience I would suggest leaving these 301s in place until you start seeing the positions in the SERPs change over to your new results.
- It's probably worth running an OSE report and double checking of any of the external links you have to your smaller sites can be altered to point at the new one - this will probably be more efficient than the 301s.
- Having protected the main pages start focusing on the rest of the pages on your sites. Don't do a blanket 301 as you'll end up with a bunch of 404s from the pages you miss. It'll take much longer to do this page by page but it'll be worth it in the end.
- Finally, in the webmaster accounts of each of your sites there is the option to inform google that your site has moved. Once you're happy with the 301s for each of the smaller sites.
Just a few tips here, more focused on moving one site over to a new domain, but should definitely be considered for a site consolidation too. The google article on moving domains will also be helpful as well:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105
Nice little Moz bit on redirections here too if you're not so comfortable with them: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
Thanks,
Nigel
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
-
Relaunching a website - SEO implicataions
Im looking to relaunch a current website, that will undergo a complete makeover. Can you you tell me what factors I need to consider in doing this, particularly with regards to maintaining seo and migrating the current site in general
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aplnzmarch180 -
If my website do not have a robot.txt file, does it hurt my website ranking?
After a site audit, I find out that my website don't have a robot.txt. Does it hurt my website rankings? One more thing, when I type mywebsite.com/robot.txt, it automatically redirect to the homepage. Please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | binhlai0 -
Having issues crawling a website
We looked to use the Screaming Frog Tool to crawl this website and get a list of all meta-titles from the site, however, it only resulted with the one result - the homepage. We then sought to obtain a list of the URLs of the site by creating a sitemap using https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. Once again however, we just go the one result - the homepage. There is something that seems to be restricting these tools from crawling all pages. If you anyone can shed some light as to what this could be, we'd be most appreciative.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
How to rank my website in Google UK?
Hi guys, I own a London based rubbish removal company, but don't have enough jobs. I know for sure that some of my competitors get most of their jobs trough Google searches. I also have a website, but don't receive calls from it at all. Can you please tell me how to rank my website on keywords like: "rubbish removal london", "waste clearance london", "junk collection london" and other similar keywords? I know that for person like me (without much experience in online marketing) will be difficult task to optimize the website, but at least - I need some advices from where to start. I'm also thinking to hire an SEO but not sure where to find a trusted company. Most importantly I have no idea how much should pay to expect good results? What is too much and what is too low? I will appreciate all advices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gorubbishgo0 -
Is it safe to link my websites together?
Hi Everyone, I have 10 websites which are all of good standing and related. My visitors would benefit of knowing about the other websites but I don't want to trigger a google penalty by linking them all together. Ideally I'd also like to pass on importance through the links as well. How would you proceed in this situation? Advice would be greatly appreciated, Peter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoyalBlueCoffee0 -
What is the best way to consolidate two websites into one?
Someone within our company's IT department just sent me some SEO advice that I believe is bogus. Can someone let me know if my initial gut-check is correct? We have two websites selling two identical catalogs of products but branded differently (color scheme, wording, etc.) like this: www.one.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ryan-Ricketts
www.two.com We want to shut down the second website. I think we should set up 301 redirects from all pages on the second site to corresponding (relevant) pages on the first. In theory, this would pass over 90% of the earned link juice from one to the other. Here is what my IT peer said: "We could keep www.two.com set up indefinitely and just have it as the same web site as www.one.com (so two URLs but one site). This would help alleviate any issues with search engine results, etc. (Although I believe Ryan would agree this does impact www.one.com's rankings a bit, but shouldn't be a problem as long as we don't advertise both.) Google doesn't know they are on the same site, so you could technically get away with it. And it helps in indexing multiple pages on our sites." ... but wouldn't this be a big no-no because of the massive amounts of duplicate content it would create?0 -
How the hell do you find good PR websites?
Hi Guys Can someone please help! How do you find high relevant PR sites that can be easiliy located using the SEO MOZ tools? How can I best use the SEO MOZ tools to locate good websites that will help me with linking building? Are the SEO MOZ tools any good?? Please can you help guys..?? Thanks Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
What is the best process to move a wordpress website ?
Hello Seomoz community, Simple question , i am looking forward to move a word press website from blog.domain.com sub domain to domain.com/blog to increase my indexed link on the root domain indexed by search engine.The blog i want to move already have high PR ( 6 ) i , of course want to avoid broken link , already indexed in search engine. What would be the best way to process to prepare this move accordingly on a SEO perspective ??? Many thanks in advance. Yan Desjardins
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SherWeb0