Network of websites

[AL123al]

Hello,

A client has an "umbrella" website which links to 4 other websites which all rank well. However, she wants to bring them all under the one website to save running costs. Do you think that is a good idea? I believe that she will lose al the benefits of having 4 successful websites linking and all the benfits that brings.

Thanks

[NBGnetworks]

Hi Caroline,

Can your client 301 redirect all the pages from the other sites to the content on the main site?  Or does she simply want to banish the other sites and their content?  If she 301 redirects the content on the other sites to the corresponding content on main new site most of your hard earned SEO work should be maintained.  But if she's going to do anything that would result in www.website4.com/oldcontent creating a 404 than all your hard work will be lost.

Just my .02

-Nick

[AL123al]

Hi,

Thanks. She wants to move from Moonfruit to Weebly but Weebly do not allow 301's from one domain to another domain only from the same domain so I don't think we can do 301's. So she will lose all of the SEO on the old sites I believe as a result. She is weighing up cost of all the websites versus one website cost.

[PaddyDisplays]

can't you just move the old domains to some super cheap hosting and set-up a .htaccess file with all the redirecting?

Remember its the old domains that are doing the redirecting, not the new one  (just make sure you do it right, there are loads of good guides online, I think MOZ has one from when they moved domain)

[AL123al]

Thanks Paddy. Moonfruit say that "Because of the structure of our software, it is not possible to transfer a site that is built using our software to an external company. All sites built using our software need to be hosted on our server"

[PaddyDisplays]

you don't need to transfer the site, just the domain (which you should own).  Before you move  go though you old site noting all the pages (urls) you want to redirect (and where you want to redirect to on the new site).  Then setup your .htaccess file.  They only thing you need hosted on the old domains it the htaccess file (assuming that the new cheap host is an Apache server)

[DarinPirkey]

First question.  Do you own the domain name or does moonfruit?

I had this same problem with a client who was on justia.com and we moved them to wordpress.  We had to re create all the pages manually.  We did it with some software to download all the old page urls, then built the pages via wordpress. We plopped it on a test server and then when we canceled the justia.com account, we moved the site to the main url.  We owned the domains so I built .htaccess files with all the old urls and new ones on main domain and then did site moves via Google WMT for the old sites they had.  We consolidated everything into one url.  We had 1800 pages among 4 sites and it took us a month to complete everything from design to theme build.

[AL123al]

Thanks for your suggestions. The client owns the domain name so will consider all your suggestions.