Best practices when merging 2 domains with different themes and CMS's?

[ThinkAOR]

I have a client with 2 sites - one for an external audience and one for their ~2,000-3,000 employees. The external site (call it acme.com), built on WP with a custom theme, is pretty small. The internal site (call it acmeinternal.com) has TONS of high quality content with incredible engagement metrics, but it's built on a separate CMS with an entirely different custom theme.

The problem we're trying to solve now: Can we bring the internal site over to the external domain (acme.com and acme.com/internal, for example) so that client.com can benefit from the quantity and quality of content and behavioral metrics associated with the internal content?

The external and internal audiences, and the corresponding content for each, are both entirely mutually exclusive. A potential client of theirs who would come to acme.com would have no reason to visit acme.com/internal (we'd actually prefer to not provide navigation to it for them), and the internal audience would treat acme.com/internal as their landing page, and all the posts would then live at acme.com/internal/news/post-name.

I'm assuming there are reasons why we couldn't have half of the site on one template using one CMS, having certain SEO tags, certain HTML structure, etc where the other half of the site is using a completely different template with a different CMS with different SEO tags, different URL structure etc? To reap the reward of the great content, would we have to essentially recreate the internal site's content on the external site's cms and template? Is it even possible for the domain authority of acme.com to improve based on the engagement on acme.com/internal/_xxxx _if there's virtually zero linking back and forth between acme.com and /internal/?

Any advice would be much appreciated!

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Alex,

You can run 2 different CMS on the same domain and from what I've seen, it doesn't really have any impact on your ranking ability if it's handled correctly. I've certainly seen plenty of websites that use one CMS to handle their products and landing pages and Wordpress for their /blog section but in all cases a deliberate effort has been made to keep them looking identical.

The biggest problem I see with that plan is that it sounds like you want the two different sections to look like two sites. While technically I suppose this would be ok, it would make for a confusing user experience!

Changing up the aesthetics slightly isn't a huge deal, you can use that to distinguish different parts of your website if that works for the UX. Moz actually does this, if you look at their Home Page, Blog and About Page you'll see that the primary nav stays exactly the same but the colour scheme and layout is slightly different on each.

Either way, I see there being two options and both involve a bit of work:

1. Update the aesthetics of your internalclient.com site before combining them so the UX is seamless
**2. **Migrate the content from one site to the other. Which direction you push it should depend on which is the most engaging in terms of aesthetics and usability.

I would expect that moving your blog/article content from clientinternal.com to client.com would be mostly copy/paste and some basic style tweaks, it just depends on the volume you're talking about. Doing that for 20 posts makes it an attractive solution but if you've accumulated 2,000... not so much. There are always options like Fiverr at your disposal for this sort of grunt work.

The final point to be cautious of is your internal linking. Just make sure you spend a good amount of time mapping out your new site structure and be meticulous about it's application, testing it with something like Screaming Frog when you're done. In the end, every item should give a 200 status; no links pointing to 301's and obviously no 404s.

EDIT: I forgot to drop some helpful resources into this one for the migration - these posts have been helpful for us in the past.

Website Migration Guide - Tips For SEOs Achieving an SEO-Friendly Domain Migration - The Infographic Domain Migrations: Surviving the "Perfect Storm" of Site Changes
301 Redirects - Migrating a New Site From Development To Live

[ThinkAOR]

Thanks Chris, I appreciate the thorough response!

As for the UX concern, I was actually in the process of updating the question to address this when your response came in. The external and internal audiences, and the corresponding content for each, are both entirely mutually exclusive. A potential customer of theirs who would come to client.com would have no reason to visit client.com/internal (we'd actually prefer to not provide navigation to it for them), and the internal audience would treat client.com/internal as their landing page, and all the posts (in the thousands) would then live at client.com/internal/news/post-name, as an example.

Your example of a domain being split between an ecomm platform and wp for the blog is great, I've worked on sites like that in the past but didn't even think of it here for some reason. I guess part of my concern also comes from wondering if it's even possible for the domain authority of client.com to improve based on the engagement on client.com/internal/_xxxx _if there's absolutely zero linking back and forth between client.com and /internal/?

[ChrisAshton]

No problem Alex, always happy to help!

For client.com to benefit from the content migration, it will need to be linked to in some way, preferably from the nav. Perhaps this could be done using a less obvious link in the header similar to where you'd expect to find a Login link but without a link to the content search engines have no way of finding it.

This link can be external but strong internal linking practices are important too. Moz does a great job of covering this here.

In terms of improving overall site strength, it will help. As you said, the engagement metrics will send some positive signals that people actually like the site but more significantly, it's going to be a lot more niche-specific, high-quality content going on the site that helps paint the picture of exactly what you do.