301 Multiple Sites to Main Site

[SLINC]

Over the past couple years I had 3 sites that sold basically the same products and content.  I later realized this had no value to my customers or Google so I 301 redirected Site 2 and Site 3 to my main site (Site 1).  Of course this pushed a lot of page rank over to Site 1 and the site has been ranking great.

About a week ago I moved my main site to a new eCommerce platform which required me to 301 redirect all the url's to the new platform url's which I did for all the main site links (Site 1).  During this time I decided it was probably better off if I DID NOT 301 redirect all the links from the other 2 sites as well.  I just didn't see the need as I figured Google realized at this point those sites were gone and I started fearing Google would get me for Page Rank munipulation for 301 redirecting 2 whole sites to my main site.

Now I am getting over 1,000 404 crawl errors in GWT as Google can no longer find the URL's for Site 2 and Site 3.  Plus my rankings have dropped substantially over the past week, part of which I know is from switching platforms.

Question, did I make a mistake not 301 redirecting the url's from the old sites (Site 2 and Site 3) to my new ecommerce url's at Site 1?

[CleverPhD]

Yes.  Put those 301s back.   If  you have sites linking to version 1 and version 2 of your site still, Google will crawl those old URLs and look for the site.  You were probably getting some link equity from those old sites still that was being passed to the new site via the 301s.

Google will crawl them again, so put the 301s back up and see what happens.  It may be a little while, but you should see traffic come back as the rankings come back and the 404 errors go down.

[AndersS]

I agree!

In addition (more long term), you should look into trying to get the external links pointing towards Site 2 and 3 redirected to site 1 (get them to change the links), so that link value is not lost in the redirects.

Good luck!

Anders

[SLINC]

Thanks for the responses.  I spent this morning 301 redirecting the most important pages from Site 1 and Site 2. Hopefully this will help.

[CleverPhD]

Good luck.  Would love to get a follow-up on this later to see how it all works out.  Either post here or send a PM.