Merging Sites - consolidation of your my web sites
-
I have had 3 tourism web sites for many years (each site represents a different place in Costa Rica) and they cross link with each other. www.monteverdetours.com is the main site - the most important one.
In order to help ranking and to comply with all the new google changes.... I have recently been advised that (page by page, I should incorporate the other site, www, arenalvolcanotours.com into the monteverde site with 301s,
In other words there will be a new directory on monteverde called /arenal-volcano-tours which will be the new home page for the arenal section. So page by page I can map the old URL's to the new URL's eg arenalvolcanotours.com/arenal-hotels-economy.html
301 redirect to
monteverdetours.com/arenal-volcano-tours/arenal-hotels-economy.htmlNow my monteverde site was once penalized by google and I am worried that doing this might have an adverse effect (although the thinking behind doing this change is because google prefers it to all the cross linking and also I will be able to consolidate all the links from Arenal into Monteverde).
I respect the person who made the suggestion but I was interested in opinions from other people! I want to be positive this is a good ideas before undertaking this major work!
Any opinions would be appreciated!
-
No worries. What I mean by "naked URL" is a link with no anchor text, just the URL.
As in:
as opposed to
-
It has taken 2 years of a lot of hard work (bad link removal, better content, social media) to get my site ranking again. It was only the monteverde site that was penalized (not a manual penalty) but it is recovering, thankfully! So I don't think the Arenal site will have an adverse effect in this way.
Ah,, sorry for my ignorance.,., what is a naked URL?? Non-follow?
-
Obviously, there is no 100% right answer.
Google's bias toward brands and larger, more powerful websites appears to only be getting stronger. Having one strong domain can often be of greater benefit than having two, weaker domains. I have personally had success with merging pages and domains to consolidate authority and link equity. If the primary site is the one that converts and brings in money, you could strengthen it in the way you suggested.
On the other hand, it can (sometimes) be easier to build links to a domain that is focused around one subject rather than a subpage. Depending on how you are working on your linkbuilding efforts, this could factor into your decision. Additionally, If the secondary domain is performing well, you might want to let sleeping dogs lie and potentially focus more of your efforts on promoting that site. This is a business decision only you can make.
Is your primary site still penalized? Do you have reason to think the secondary site is at risk for a penalty? The mere act of merging domains carries no risk of penalties that i know of (anyone is free to correct me here), but there is the potential for one site to "infect" the other. [Side note: you may want a few more naked URL anchors pointing at your sites, especially arenalvolcanotours.com.]
All in all, if someone you trust conducted a thorough audit and this was his/her advice, I would consider it.
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
-
My site just dropped significant!
Just noticed that my website onlinecasting.co.za just dropped 50+ places on basically all the keywords I'm following.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KasperGJ
I can also see, that today there almost havent been any new sign-ups so something happened.
I didnt change anything. On issue, which might have something to do with it, is that I own several "copies" of the same site, just in different countries (domains). I host the websites myself, and they are all on the same server. The text and design in the same in some of the countries except that "jobs" are unique for the country. I also have:
onlinecasting.ae (english)
onlinecasting.sg (english)
onlinecasting.mx
and more coming So, could that be the reason, that google somehow now decided, that it wont accept the "allmost same site"?0 -
Malicious links on our site indexed by Google but only visible to bots
We've been suffering from some very nasty black hat seo. In Google's index, our pages show external links to various pharmaceutical websites, but our actual live pages don't show them. It seems as though only certain user-agents see the malicious links. Setting up Screaming Frog SEO crawler using the Googlebot user agent also sees the malicious links. Any idea what could have caused this or how this can be stopped? We scanned all files on our webserver and couldn't find any of malicious links. We've changed our FTP and CMS passwords, is there anything else we can do? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEO-Bas0 -
Ecommerce sites we own have similar products, is this OK?
Hello, In one of our niches, we have a big site with all products and a couple more sites that are smaller niches of the same niche. The product descriptions are different with different product names. Is this OK. We've got one big site and 2 smaller subsides in different niches that cross over with the big site. Let me know if Google is OK with this. We will have a separate blog for each with completely different content. There's not really duplicate content issues and although only the big site has a blog right now, the small ones eventually will have their own unique blog. Is this OK in Google's eyes now and in the future? What can we do to ensure we are OK? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW1 -
Strange referral site: www.cyberonlineclicking.com would like some insights from the community
Hello Mozzers! I've noticed that our site has been receiving a significant amount of referral traffic from a rather suspect looking site: www.cyberonlineclicking.com Can anyone shed any light on this beast. Stopped receiving traffic around 11th November, but was getting 20K sessions over a 4 week period. The traffic was of poor quality, but would be good to know how or why they were linking to my site (fejobs dot com). Looks very suspicious. Thanks Justin
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Two sites, heavily cross linking, targeting the same keyword - is this a battle worth fighting?
Hi Mozzers, Would appreciate your input on this, as many people have differing views on this when asked... We manage 2 websites for the same company (very different domains) - both sites are targeting the same primary keyword phrase, however, the user journey should incorporate both websites, and therefore the sites are very heavily cross linked - so we can easily pass a user from one site to another. Whilst site 1 is performing well for the target keyword phrase, site 2 isn't. Site 1 is always around 2 to 3 rank, however we've only seen site 2 reach the top of page 2 in SERPs at best, despite a great deal of white hat optimisation, and is now on the decline. There's also a trend (all be it minimal) of when site 1 improves in rank, site 2 drops. Because the 2 sites are so heavily inter-linked could Google be treating them as one site, and therefore dropping site 2 in the SERPs, as it is in Google's interests to show different, relevant sites?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | A_Q0 -
Failed microsites that negatively affect main site: should I just redirect them all?
While they are great domain names, I suspect my 7 microsites are considered spammy and resulted in a filter on my main e-commerce site for the important keywords we now have a filter blocking from showing up in search. Should I consider it a sunk cost and redirect them all to my main e-commerce site, or is there any reason why that would make things worse? I've fixed just about everything I can thinking of in response to Panda and Penguin, before which we were on the first page for everything. That includes adding hundreds of pages of unique and relevant content, in the form of buyers guides and on e-commerce category pages -- resolving issues of thin content. Then I hid URL parameters in Ajax, sped up the site significantly, started generating new links... nothing... I have tons of new keywords for other categories, but I still clearly have that filter on those few important head keywords. The anchor text on the microsites leading to the main site are typically not exact match, so I don't think that's the issue. It has to be that the sites themselves are considered spammy. My bosses are not going to like the idea because they paid for those awesome domains, but would the best idea be to redirect them to the e-commerce site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ElBo9130 -
Am I Being Penalized For Having My Whole Site In A Subfolder Named With A Keyword?
I inherited a client. For some reason, their previous webmaster set up the site so everything is in a subfolder /law/. It's an attorney website. All the urls have the primary domain name /law/ and then assigned url. I can't image this is helping but could the site be penalized for this by Google or Bing? It's set up like this: www.attorneysite.com**/law/**therestoftheurl /law/ is included in EVERY PAGE... even the homepage.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DeltonChilds0