Interesting site migration question.

[PASSLtd]

Hi all.

I'm looking for some thoughts on a migrations option we have.

At the moment we have two E-Com sites ranking well for some of the same terms.

An older site, and a nice new site. The older site is ranking very well for category and product terms, the new one is slowly coming up.

Ideally we would like to have one site, the nice new one, and get rid of the old one.

If I 301 the old site url's to the new sites will that bring the new site url's into the same position as the old ones?

I'm just not sure how this effects sites that are already ranking well.

Any ideas are welcomed but I'm really looking for a definitive answer. It's a big decision after all.

[matbennett]

301ing the old URLs to the new ones will pass the link equity that they had gained from external links. However this doesn't necessarily equate to the new pages having the same rankings: there are other factors that will influence that.

For instance, if the new page had much better on page optimisation than the old one then it could rank better. Likewise if the structure of your site gave more (or less) prominence to a particular URL then that might influence how it ranks.

The definitive answer you are looking for is "probably not". However I would say that the more accurate answer is "probably not, but there is not reason you couldn't not equal of better the other rankings, if you pay attention to the other factors in play".