Redirecting a blog

[Caro-O]

We've acquired another company and want to redirect their soon-to-be-obsolete website to ours.

It includes a blog with many blog posts. Should we:

only 301 redirect the top level blog URL
try redirect individual blogs to blogs of a similar topic on our site (least practical I'm sure)
redirect all their individual posts to our main blog URL

Thanks, Caro

[donsilvernail]

The redirects should always be to the most similar content on your site. The reason being is when the old site is being crawled by the search engine spider they will encounter the 301 permanent redirect and replace the index with the new url the redirect points to. So if you point all the links to irrelevant content you may loose ranking. The point of the 301 permanent redirect is to carry link juice over to the new urls.

[GlobeRunner]

What you'll want to do is crawl the other site--and make note of all of the URLs. Then, 301 redirecting each page to the most appropriate page on the main site.

We usually recommend using a spreadsheet and making a list of the old URLs in one column and then listing the page it will redirect to next to it, in another column. That will make it easy to set up the 301 redirects in the .htaccess file on the site or put them into a redirect plugin.

There will be pages that you can't find another equivalent page on the new site--so you should 301 redirect those to the site's home page.

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi Caro

Just before I directly answer your question can I ask whether you have done a backlink audit on their site? If not I would strongly advice it in order to make sure they don't have any penalties or links you don't want associating with your site. I like to work this way, yes it does take longer but you are going into it with your eyes wide open and avoiding any issues down the line, which will inevitably take up even more time trying to rectify. I would recommend further reading on the following:

Link Audit - http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2207168/how-to-conduct-a-link-audit

Link Removals & Risk Mitigation - https://moz.com/blog/link-audit-guide-for-effective-link-removals-risk-mitigation

As the others have already said I would look to redirect individual URLs to similar corresponding URLs on your site in order to get the best from this. As we know 301 redirects pass authority from the original URL to the new one.

However I would also take this one step further and look at the Google Analytics and Google Search Console Search Analytics Report for the other companies site if you have access to it and I would look at the most popular pages in terms of organic traffic. I would also look to analyse current rankings for that site and see if it is out ranking any of the corresponding content on your site. If so I would look to use it to improve my own content and then still do the 301 redirect. I have done this in the past and when moving across a popular blog from one site to yours I would look and see what are the most popular posts in terms of organic traffic as mentioned above but also other factors such as social interaction (I find https://socialcrawlytics.com/ ) and referrals. Then if my current site that I am redirecting too doesn't have some content that is on the same subject and very close in nature and popular I would look to migrate the content itself to a new post with the same content and then 301 redirect the original to that new piece.

Too many times you see people rushing this and just blanket redirecting things, however they forget that 1. you need to redirect to similar content to get the most benefit as a redirect is essentially telling the search engines the content has moved to a new location and 2 you won't always get close matches so why not take that content and publish it on yours if it is already working rather than trying to fit it somewhere it doesn't (basically don't force a square peg in a round hole).

Obviously I don't know how strong the site you want to redirect is but taking time over this now will pay dividends.

Hope this helps!

Matt

[MattRoney]

Hi Caro!

We'd love an update on this. Have any of the responses helped? And if so, would you mind marking one or more as a "Good Answer?"

Thanks!

[Caro-O]

Thanks for the nudge Matt,

We're in the process of working on the redirects now...and checking GA results based on Matt-Williamson's feedback.

~Caro