seo redirect Archives - Gravity Search Marketing

Ask the Experts: Should I Consolidate Sites for SEO?

October 1, 2012
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: We have two different businesses: catering and personal chef. Over time, we’ve ended up with two sites for these services. Additionally, we’ve purchased other domains and have them redirecting to the main sites. The personal chef site is not ranking well, but there is a personal chef page on the catering site that is ranking well. We are thinking about building a new site and condensing them into one, but are worried we may lose the traffic that the old personal chef page had. What can we do to retain this traffic?

A: First, a quick note regarding your parked domains: These are probably neither helping nor hurting the SEO presence of your main sites. But one good reason to keep control of these domains is so they won’t be be snagged up by competitors and used to compete against you. Be sure to re-point any redirects if you do decide to move your sites.

There is no single, definitive answer about whether or not to consolidate your two sites to a single site. Here are a few pros and cons of consolidation that may help guide you:

PRO: consolidation of authority & trust signals such as social sharing and inbound links will tend to make a single, unified website have more power in search engines than two separate sites.
PRO: a unified site makes online word of mouth more straightforward. Good reviews of one arm of your business will reflect well on the other arm.
CON: a unified site will need to compete with focused sites that can specifically optimize for each of the specific services (personal chef vs. catering).
CON: A unified site is probably less likely to have the opportunity to get links from lists or directories of one or the other service.
CON: You have an existing rank that you are legitimately concerned about losing. A 301 redirect from the old page to the new page is highly recommended, but even with that, it’s possible that the rank will suffer.

If these two sites truly are two separate businesses, with a different customer base, different service offerings, and having different conversations online, then it probably makes more sense to retain the separate sites (while linking between them, naturally).

If you do choose to unify, re-using one of your existing domains would be best. Is the catering domain name general enough to house both businesses? In that case we would recommend keeping the page that is ranking well (personal chef) at the same URL that it is currently on, and redesigning around it.

If it is not possible to re-tool the catering site so that it encompasses the personal chef site, and you feel a strong need to move both sites to a new domain, be sure to follow the page redirect recommendations we discuss in “Oops, I Redesigned my Website. An SEO Checklist.” A key point: you’ll need a 301 redirect from the existing personal chef page to the new URL. So,

www.example1.com/personal-chef/ should 301 redirect to www.example2.com

However, even if you do everything right in a move such as this, you should be prepared for a drop in search rankings. Like ripping off a band-aid, the pain will probably pass quickly, but it is not impossible that your site would suffer long-term ranking drops from moving domains, so we only recommend moving sites if absolutely necessary.

ask the experts

Ask the Experts: How Do I Redirect a Domain?

September 6, 2006
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: We own a number of domain names that are fairly significant in our industry. Can we have these different domain names auto-redirect to our main URL without the search engines perceiving this as a trick? We are very honest people and don’t want to do anything that will be perceived as a trick, but at the same time we want to take advantage of these other domain names in case a user types them in directly into the address bar (we know this will not improve rankings).

A: This is a very common situation, and you should be able to redirect without any problems. Just be sure to set it up with a server-side 301 redirect (your webmaster or host should know what this is), and the search engines will get the message!

You might also want to read our segment on site re-designs in Chapter 11 of Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Dayfor additional SEO redesign tips. And if you’re looking for advice on redirecting a domain after a website redesign, be sure to read “Oops, I Redesigned My Website! An SEO Checklist.”

And be sure to watch out for these potential problems:

Duplicate content – make sure that you put all of your content on your main domain only; and
Outdated Links – make sure that all links (both in your site and other sites) are pointing to your main domain.

By the way, a very similar situation occurs when you have a website that displays both with and without the “www” prefix (for example: //www.yourseoplan.com and http://yourseoplan.com). In this case, the best plan is to use a Google Sitemap, which is a free service provided by Google that send the message to Google about which version of the URL is preferable. Here is a quote from the Google Sitemap guidelines:

“Preferred domain: Is your site available with and without a www prefix? Until now, the recommendation was to do a 301 permanent redirect of one to the other. But some people can’t easily do this. Now sitemaps has a preferred domain tool that lets you pick which you prefer. Make your choice, and Google will list the domain you choose. Behind the scenes, Google will understand the two domains are one and the same for purposes of things like link calculations. Keep in mind that Google says it will take some time before the changes are visible. Also keep in mind that you’ll still need to do 301 redirection for other search engines. “

Ask the Experts: Should I Consolidate Sites for SEO?

Ask the Experts: How Do I Redirect a Domain?

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