SEO Risks for redirecting sites

[ahead4]

As TommyTan says:

For large redirect projects, you should redirect all that you want to keep the value from.  Don't mass redirect to a single page, as most won’t end up passing value, so keep all redirects pointed to pages which are relevant to the original.

You will have to wait a little while for search engines to recrawl and update their indexes. For a clean switchover that pushes all existing link juice to the new pages I'd do them at once.

[TommyTan]

Hi Daniel,

From what I know, I don't believe their is any risk at doing all the domains at once.  Furthermore, you are not doing to the same page but from geodomains to different geo-subdomains.  I've  read about people redirecting 50,000 pages in comments and I don't recall anyone mentioning their is any risk.

The only risk I can think of is it might take longer for search engines to recrawl all the pages.  Maybe someone can show some light in this.

You can tell your client that suffer a few drop in ranks in the short run for success in the long run.

[MikeRoberts]

This reminded me of something Maile Ohye from Google was talking about at SMX NY.

In her talk about 301 vs Rel=Canonical she brought up the idea of putting notices on a site first that Site A is now a part of the Site B Family and will be consolidated in the future and giving people (and the spiders) a link to the new site to start building relevancy. Then later on implementing canonicals across Site A pointing to the relevant places on Site B. Gradually moving towards 301 redirects once Site B becomes the place people now recognize as the main site and the original is no longer needed.

[This of course is all paraphrased and from memory as I don't have my voice recordings of the session handy nor did anyone from Google provide PDFs of their slideshows]

[EGOL]

I generally advocate for consolidating a group of sites.... but... are some of these sites penalized?  Might be a good idea to understand why and the impact of merging them with unpenalized sites.

Also, if you are going to consolidate, combing the site into folders instead of subdomains can merge the domain authority.  Do some research on this before move forward.

[Level2Designs]

Thanks, TommyTan, that's very reassuring!

[Level2Designs]

Hi EGOL,

The sites that we are merging were penalized about 2 years ago. Their value has since begun to increase again, but they still haven't reached the level they were at before the penalization. After all the research we did to answer "why" they were penalized, we could only assume that it was because of our client's massive network of sites.

This was all implemented before I came onto the project. A mistake was made somewhere along the way that set off a "red flag" to Google that these sites were in cahoots (for lack of a better phrase) and penalized them.

We're hoping that the penalization occurred long enough ago that it will not harm the sites we are consolidating the penalized sites into.

My understanding of subdomains vs. folders is that for instances where the topics could virtually be separated (as is the case with multiple geographical locations), then subdomains are the optimal way to go. My client is also interested in ranking well in Google Local, and wants to have separate listings for each business location - which will also be beneficial if we take the subdomain route. I'll admit though, I'm a bit rusty on this topic and would welcome any advice or further resources! I'll do some more research, but if you have any further thoughts on the matter please do send them my way!

Thanks again!

[Level2Designs]

I was leaning towards doing all the redirects at once, but didn't have the experience to back that theory up. Thanks for the advice!

[Level2Designs]

Hey Mike,

That sounds like an interesting discussion and sorry I couldn't hear it in person. I'm not sure if this would be relevant to my specific project though - our ultimate goal is to merge two existing sites into one. They have relatively the same content and subjects, meaning the userbase is also probably very similar. The speech that you're referring to sounds like it would be more suitable for a site that is going through a redesign and moving to a new domain name. Your thoughts?

[EGOL]

I have found that folders perform better than subdomains.

I have done 301 redirects of subdomains into folders and the rankings went up strongly.  I attribute this to combining the link popularity.

[MikeRoberts]

Her general example was based on her, Matt Cutts and another Google employee having Fitness websites that she then buys and how she would go about the use of canonicals and 301s to show users and search engines that she is the most relevant authority. One of the pluses with the canonicals involved branded searches that would still pull the Matt Cutts site instead of the Maile Ohye site but link equity would be directed to her site and users would be less likely to bounce since the canonical would serve the Matt page whereas a 301 may be jarring at first because if you're looking for Matt and get Maile you may be more likely to bounce even though its the content you are looking for.

(God, I swear I can explain this better in my own head than I can once I attempt to write it out... which is bad considering I actually make a living writing)