Multiple retail sites redirected to one

[DennyGan]

Recently our company has acquired several high ranking retail websites which sell only our brand of products. We are now considering consolidating all our online sales from these different retail sites to be direct to our main website.

The question we have is how do we do this without negatively affecting SEO for these high ranking retail sites?

[AlanMosley]

I would look at all the i comming links for all sites, have a look at their link text and reffereing page. then i would decide what page i would want to point them using a 301 redirect, one by one. if you 301 all of them on mass to the home page they will likly be dismissed.

Try doing a few each week.

[maldiniii]

If that sites rank high, why not keep them as they are? And sale your products through all of them.

The best way to redirect is URL from a site to URL from other site. It's all about relevancy. I mean, you cannot redirect a chair page to a sofa page and take credit and rankings.

[AlanMosley]

If you keep all the sites then you have to maintain all sites, find links for all sites split your efforts between all sites.

The best is to redirect link by link, not page by page, as it is important to be relevant to the linking page and link text, not the old linked page. you may already have a link from a page about cats, with link text cats pointing to a page about dogs, now is a time to fix that not copy the errors across.

[ltom]

Use your strength and keep the sites alive! Give people the best information there is and give people the posibility to go to your "company site" where you create a funnel to convert!

[ltom]

It's true that its a lot of work, but you can focus the strength to sertain keywords

[AlanMosley]

it is a lot of work, but its a lot of work to get links in the first place, so it is best to get the most ourt of them

[DennyGan]

Thanks Alan,

So what we're currently trying to understand is since these one off retail sites are only using Paypal and or Google Checkout it should just be a matter of directing one outgoing link from all sites 'Buy Now' so it will redirect to our store on shop.abc.us and SEs will consider this like any other outgoing link?

Our reasoning is by changing only one element "Buy Now" buttons the SE is looking at these out going links to Paypal and Google Checkout already so 301 redirecting to our site now shouldn't affect SEO.

[AlanMosley]

you can do that, but i would 301 then, you have so many links keeping all these sites ranking, or you can have all of the links making one site rank the best.