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
-
How to fix site breadcrumbs on mobile google search
For past one month, I have been doing some research on how to fix this issue on my website but all my efforts didn't work out I really need help on this issue because I'm worried about this I was hoping that Google will cache or understand the structure of my site and correct the error the breadcrumb is working correctly on desktop but not shown on mobile. For Example take a look at : https://www.xclusivepop.com/omah-lay-bad-influence/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ericrodrigo0 -
Competitor has same site with multiple languages
Hey Moz, I am working with a dating review website and we have noticed one of our competitors is basically making duplicated of their site with .com, .de, .co.uk, etc. My first thought is this is basically a way to game the system but I could be wrong. They are tapping into googles geo results by including major cities in each state, i.e. "dating in texas" "dating in atlanta" however the content itself doesn't really change. I can't figure out exactly why they are ranking so much higher. For example using some other SEO tools they have a traffic estimate of $500,000 monthly, where as we are sitting around $2000. So, either the traffic estimates are grossly misrepresenting traffic volume, OR they really are crushing it. TLDR: Is geo locating/translating sites a valid way to create backlinks? It's seems a lot like a PBN.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
How to consolidating my domains to the .com
Hey Mozers, Just watched Rands white board friday about consolidating domains https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/rebrand-or-redirect-my-site-consolidate-multiple-sites-whiteboard-friday I would like to consider looking at consolidating my cctld's zenory.co.nz and zenory.com.au over to zenory.com I have been told by our previous seo guy to go international eg. target USA, NZ and Australia. Consolidate into 1 website (your .com), and separate your website into different subfolders for each target country zenory.com/us/, zenory.com/au/, zenory.com/nz/. If I'm not really writing country specific content for the blog I could just keep 1 blog at zenory.com/blog/ Can anyone recommend a guide around the technical side of how to apply these changes without causing issues? Our website is custom built with wordpress being the blog. Any advice will be much appreciated Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Algorithmically penalized site
I have been doing SEO for years, but luckily have never had a client penalized or had to go through that. I see everyone talking about it at conferences and know the absolute basics of recovery, but just had someone come to me that was algorithmically penalized about two years ago. They have no actual data to show me a date and they couldn't tell me a specific date. According to them, their SEO disappeared and wouldn't give them access to the analytics. They are definitely showing just about every red flag with anchor tags and low trust links and tons of duplicate content. Just about everything. I realize you don't have the deep data to go by, but are there cases when it is just better to start over from scratch. They have literally thousands of bad links and strange site pages that they say they weren't even aware of. Whether they were or not I guess isn't the point now, but I have heard rumors that if you start over, Google will still figure it out and follow you with the penalty. Is this true or documented? Don't want to potentially recommend that if that is something that generally happens to bad offenders. Happy to do the work and try to resolve their issues, but it is a lot of work and is going to be expensive and want to present other options. Thanks and any thoughts suggestions are appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jeremyskillings0 -
I think My Site Has Been Hacked
I am working with a client and have noticed lots of 500 server errors that look very strange in their webmaster tools account. I am seeing URLs like this blog/?tag=wholesale-cheap-nfl-jerseys-free-0702.html and blog/?tag=nike-jersey-shorts-4297.html there are 155 similar pages yet the client does not sell anything like this and hasn't created these URLs. I have updated WP and all plugins and cannot find these links or pages on the site anywhere but I am guessing they are slowing the site down as GWT keeps highlighting them as errors. Has anybody had any experiences with these types of hacks and can point me in the right direction of how to clean it up properly? Ta
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | fazza470 -
Am i getting backlink benefits from sites i design and host
I own & host over 300 domains for as many businesses. They all link back to my site from every page. but seomoz shows only hundred. so do other seo tools. why is that?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | nooptee0 -
Is my competitor up to no good? Strange site-explorer results.
I'm researching a competitor using site explorer and the seomoz toolbar and getting some strange results. When you search by the domain name in site explorer you get no results, but the toolbar shows 170K incoming links. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.augustagreenlawns.com I noticed the top referring page was a strange internal url so I ran that through site explorer and discovered 19 links.. When you put the strange link in a browser, it redirects to the home url;.. At this url the toolbar shows 220 links and semoz shows 19 http://www.augustagreenlawns.com/?xid_78e7f=0f2a64344c8de6bdf2d8cdf8de93ea5c http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.augustagreenlawns.com%2F%3Fxid_78e7f%3D0f2a64344c8de6bdf2d8cdf8de93ea5c What is up with that url? What are they doing? This is a site ranking #1 for my local search term even though he has about 50 pages of almost duplicate content. See link below. I'm really scratching my head here. http://www.augustagreenlawns.com/home.php?all=categories
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dwallner0 -
Will the links coming from an article in certain BLOG / NEWS SITE become a GOOD BackLink?
Such as, if i wrote a ymoz, and suddenly the articles is accepted, will the link to our site coming out of that Article Post increased our SEO Standing? Another example would be http://active.tutsplus.com , yesterday i have successfully pitched a tutorial idea, and they told me to write it so that they can published it , and they also promised that i will be able to put my site link (dofollow) ... But will these link be a Good BackLink that will increase our site's SEO Standing? The last one is exactly the same link , but this time coming from a News Site , such as http://teknologi.kompasiana.com/internet/2011/06/09/website-full-flash-dengan-inovasi-hebat-karya-indonesia/ , in this article (kompasiana is a very wellknown site news in Indonesia, in fact KOMPAS is the biggest newspaper firm in Indonesia) , our site is being featured , there is a link coming out of that article (DOFOLLOW), but will that link make our site much more SEO Friendly? Again please enlighten me 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IKT0