How to handle a merge with another site

[webfeatseo]

I own a gaming site at legendzelda.net

Recently a site zelda-temple.net wanted to merge communities and sites. We pretty much scrapped their content (a lot was articles I already had topics on), merged the user databases, and redirected the domain to mine.

What is the best seo way to redirect that domain. I tried to set up a 301 on the entire domain to gain all the backlinks that site had (A LOT) but it seems as if a lot are not being picked up by the open site explorer and other tools.

Advice?

[RobertFisher]

if your 301 is domain to domain it will not work or will take forever. You need to set up the 301 in the .htaccess file and do it url to url. So, if you had zelda-temple.net/xyz/ and on your site you had othertemple.com/xyz you would 301 the zelda/xyz to yoursurl/xyz.

This way the link juice will be transferred around 90%

Typically we see as much as 95% transferred over several months.

As to showing in OSE, due to the timing of the crawls you will not see changes for 5 to 7 weeks and then monthly thereafter. No need to watch that daily. The schedule for the crawl is here: http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape-Schedule

Hope this helps

[webfeatseo]

I am wanting to have it where it will be

oldsite.com/dhddh

to newsite.com/

oldsite/forums

to

newsite.com

Every page on old site to index of new site.

I have tried a variety of 301s and rewrites with no success.

And this merger actually went down back in late October and i had the domain redirecting to my new one and been checking for updates to the linkscape since then and havent seen anything.

[webfeatseo]

I have implemented this and it seems to be working now. Does this look like a solution that will work and if so will I start to see the links coming toward the new domain here when the linkscape update goes down next month?

RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^zelda-temple.netRewriteRule (.) http://www.zelda-temple.net/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteEngine onRewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.zelda-temple.net$RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://legendzelda.net [R=301,L]

[AdamThompson]

That's not the best way to do it. The method Robert outlined is better.

[webfeatseo]

Due to the way the old site was set up that is not possible so it is not an option at this point

[RobertFisher]

I do not believe that will work for you the way you are hoping. As it stands, what you are doing is redirecting every page on zelda-temple to legendzelda.net, your home page. Since I don't know much about legends of Zelda  (I am more of a Modern Warfare kinda guy) 
I am assuming the site generates money from sponsors and that those sponsors are on various pages throughout. 
If someone wants to go to a given page for say "majoras Mask", your PA there is 21 (you only have one linking root domain) whereas your homepage today is at 51.

So long as you believe all will come to the homepage and stay there long enough to look at sponsors before going on, leave it as is.

If you want to enhance the site and have more people seeing individual pages (through better ranking) as opposed to the homepage, you need to change the 301 so that you are linking url to url.

Best

[webfeatseo]

The main focus of my site is news and coverage on the most recent games.

Like

http://legendzelda.net/zelda-skyward-sword/

The other games are older and get less coverage and sadly my site was not around when some of these games came out (back to the 80's) so I am focusing on news and the most recent games. As you will see the page linked there has a better PA than some the older games as this one just came out and was the focus for quite some time.

So am not looking to boost the PA for most inner pages. Just wanting to get all the pages from that old site to go to my main page, get the news, see who I am, and hopefully become a daily reader.

[RobertFisher]

Then I would do it as you have and just understand it will take a bit longer.