301 Redirects - 4 sites into 1

[PamelaH88]

Hey all,

I have an SEO conundrum that seems to have no right or wrong answer.   If you have 2 minutes I’d love to hear your opinion.

The Situation
Our client has 4 ecommerce sites (Sites A, B, C & D) all selling the same products.
He wishes to to merge all 4 sites into a single site (Site A)

Options
In order to maintain maximum SEO authority do we:

A - Choose a single site (B, C, or D)  with the most SEO authority/juice/power and 301 re-direct it into Site A
Or
B – 301 re-direct all 3 sites (B, C & D)  into Site A

Our experience says that 301’ing from a single site works well, but from multiple sites feels spammy and risky.

Really keen too hear your thoughts.

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Pamela,

I'd lean toward redirecting the other sites to the one that currently carries the most power, assuming that site is also producing the best UX and engagement metrics (bounce rate, conversion rate etc). Rankings and user metrics typically go hand in hand but it's worth double-checking.

As for how to do the redirect, this is where it becomes more of a grey area because there are so many variables so it depends on your situation. Ultimately all pages that are receiving direct or referral traffic should be redirected to the equivalent page on the strongest site so those users will still arrive at the right product rather than just the home page.

The reason it's not that simple is because you might have 300,000 products with 60% of those getting direct/referral traffic so identifying these and getting the 301s set up would take a considerable amount of time and if done via htaccess, that's a lot of entries to be parsed on page load which isn't great for site speed. Alternatively, you might only have 5 or 6 of these pages in which case the site speed difference would be immeasurable and setting it up would take a matter of minutes.

Apologies for the somewhat vague response but hopefully it points you in the right direction.

[PamelaH88]

Hi Chris

Thanks for your response.

Do you feel that 301 re-directing all 3 sites into 1 is a viable solution? Are there any pitfalls to be aware of?

Our client has circa 3000 products on site.

Thank you!

[dohertyjf]

Hi Pamela! Great question here. I dealt with something similar a few years ago with an ecommerce client.

I love that your client is thinking about consolidating all of the products under one brand. From a pure branding perspective, and also ease of updating and lowering technical overhead, this definitely makes sense. Right now they're spread across a bunch of sites and there is likely no cohesive brand. And if you're doing good SEO and thus content marketing and building links, you are dividing your effort by 4 or he is paying 4x what he needs to in order to have his business where he wants it to be.

It's also an interesting question to me because of this - even if you ranked 1-4 for all 4 of his sites (which is honestly unrealistic), would he be making more money than having one site where all the attention is focused to convert as many people as possible? I have to believe that having one site is best, though you'll need to honestly do the math on how much traffic all of the sites are getting and if you can honestly get that same amount on just 1 site.

If you are going to consolidate them, your option B is the one I would go with. Redirect sites B, C, & D into site A, making sure you are doing 1:1 301 redirects. I don't see this as being spammy at all to be completely honest with you - your client owns all 4 sites and it consolidating them. It may take some time for the search engines to honor all of the 301s, but this feels like exactly the use case a 301 is meant for.

Hope that helps.

John

[conradoconnell]

Not to muddy the waters, but I have had a client with sites (2) going after the same keyword set -- my first thought was to condense them into one through a 301 strategy towards the "stronger" domain. For a myriad of non-SEO reasons, this didn't happen in a short timeframe and we ended up really glad it didn't. Our SEO efforts for domain A were helping domain B through some inter-linking we were doing and today (1.5~ years later) the sites are ranking #2 and #3 for hundreds of the same keywords. We actually spent some time removing some of those links between domains as many were using exact-match anchor text and did not any major losses in traffic to either domain.

In general I'd say that having one single site is better from a content management, link building and branding perspective. However, I do not feel that is blanket advice anymore. Perhaps the best strategy here is to redirect the "worst" performing domain into site A and carefully keep an eye on your rankings/traffic, then slowly phase in the other sites over time. I'd also be cautious about 301'ing many sites into a valuable site all at once as you may lose out on traffic.

If the keywords overlap and you have more than one site ranking, I'd think about perhaps consider leaving the "second best" site up for a few months to see how it performs. You may be happy with the results.