Closing down site and redirecting its traffic to another

[THB]

OK - so we currently own two websites that are in the same industry.

Site A is our main site which hosts real estate listings and rentals in Canada and the US.

Site B hosts rentals in Canada only.

We are shutting down site B to concentrate solely on Site A, and will be looking to redirect all traffic from Site B to Site A, ie. user lands on Toronto Rentals page on Site B, we're looking to forward them off to Toronto Rentals page on Site A, and so on.  Site A has all the same locations and property types as Site B.

On to the question:

We are trying to figure out the best method of doing this that will appease both users and the Google machine.  Here's what we've come up with (2 options):

When user hits Site B via Google/bookmark/whatever, do we:

1. Automatically/instantly (301) redirect them to the applicable page on Site A?

2. Present them with a splash page of sorts ("This page has been moved to Site A.  Please click the following link <insert anchor="" text="" rich="" url="" here="">to visit the new page.").</insert>

We're worried that option #1 might confuse some users and are not sure how crawlers might react to thousands of instant redirects like that.

Option #2 would be most beneficial to the end-user (we're thinking) as they're being notified, on page, of what's going on.  Crawlers would still be able to follow the URL that is presented within the splash write-up.

Thoughts?  We've never done this before.  It's basically like one site acquiring another site; however, in this case, we already owned both sites.  We just don't have time to take care of Site B any longer due to the massive growth of Site A.

Thanks for any/all help.

• Marc

[BeardoCo]

I would set up a splash page letting people know that the page is going to be redirected.  I believe if your receiving decent traffic to your site that the end user's experience is more important than the search engine value.  You could also set up a splash page that reads they will automatically be redirected within "set amount of seconds"

[THB]

Thanks for the insight.  We were also leaning that route.

Just a note: Site B isn't receiving much traffic anymore (maybe 1K visitors a day).  Has been in a steady decline for quite some time simply due to lack of time and effort towards it.

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hi,

Most definitely do a 301 redirect because it will keep most of your link juice and it will let the search engine know that the page/site has moved. As long as the page is redirected to a relevant logical page you will be fine... no matter how many 301s you do. However if the page does not make sense to redirect do not redirect instead you can display a 404 page (splash page) etc...

From the user end they will be redirected to the new page. If the origin of the redirect is the old domain (site B) try to change it, or edit it so it has the new location/anchor.

[djlaidler]

Hi Mark,

I personally would run a clean 301 to the new site, then use something like $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] (in PHP) to determine where the user came from.  If it's from the old site, run a small banner in the header (like Hello bar) to advise your users of the change. This would be a lot cleaner for search engines and very user friendly.

Don't forget to transfer the sites worth using webmasters...

Hope this helps.

Dan