Merge 2 websites into one, using a non-existing, new domain.

[jarydcat1]

I need to merge https://www.WebsiteA.com and https://www.WebsiteB.com to a fresh new domain (with no content) https://www.WebsiteC.com. I want to do it the best way to keep existing SEO juice.

Website A is the companies home page and built with Wordpress

Website B is the company product page and built with Wordpress

Website C will be the new site containing both website A and B, utilizing Wordpress also.

What is the best way to do this? I have research a lot and keep hitting walls on how to do it.

It's a little trickier because it's two different domains going to a brand new domain.

Thanks

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

One way to do this is to decide which site is going to be the main site (site A) sat on C and copy this data over. If you are bringing in site B, then this can sit at another structure level - you will end up with this...

Site A --> Site C, main pages
Site B --> Site C, product pages

That then brings in everything from both sites to the new domain.

You then want to redirect both of the old sites to the new one, but don't redirect everything to the root. That isn't a good use of 301 mapping. You need to be mapping on a page level so that you will see...

www.sitea.com/about us -301- www.sitec.com/aboutus
www.siteb.com/newproducts/hammers -301- www.sitec.com/newproducts/hammers

There can be differences in the URL's - you don't need to stick with the same structure as the other sites if it doesn't make sense, but always map pages to something very similar.

Page level is the only way to go if you want to maintain a seamless transition for users as well.

Also, don't expect to hit a switch and do this all at once. You can do this over a period of time because to the user, they will just be redirected to the new pages. You will retain more link juice like this.

This is quite a lengthy process and I am sure I have missed the in-between bits, but this is the basis of what you want to be doing.

Others might chip in with other suggestions for you.

-Andy

[Linda-Vassily]

I did just this type of thing a little over a year ago and organic traffic is up over 300% now. We made the change mainly to improve the structure of the website(s), with more logical organization and better internal linking. We did do the move all at once (thousands of pages) but it took a lot of behind-the scenes planning to be ready for that.

First came the decisions about what sections and categories made sense for our site. (Using the URL structure to guide users around the site makes it easier for them to find what they are looking for and interlinking between related posts as appropriate is also good—and this helps a lot with search engines.)

Then came the organization of posts into their new categories. To make things easier, we kept the individual path names the same (so www.siteA.com/old-category/old-post-string became www.siteC.com/new category/old-post-string) and uploaded them into their new categories when the time came.

We also used this time to do a limited content review (posts with the most traffic) and we updated a lot of these. We made the choice to keep most of our old posts, even though in our market they can get outdated quickly, to conserve any links we may have acquired. (The main site that we were directing to the new site was pretty old and had picked up a lot of links over time.)

We could have done a more complete content review before the changeover, but in part we wanted to see how these posts did under the new structure—we did get renewed life out of some of them, and we further updated and optimized those.

In conjunction with the export of the old sites to the new one, we made sure to 301 redirect all of the old posts to their counterparts on the new site. For the posts we chose not to bring over, we 301 redirected them to a related post in the same category.

We still occasionally come across things that need to be fixed—old posts that need redirecting/updating or 404 errors that need to be tracked down (one big issue we found was a lot of old pages had old links with hard paths to the old website root domains, causing a bunch of nasty internal not found errors—not good!) but overall we are happy with the change. (Up 308%!)

[jarydcat1]

Thanks Andy!

I'm still a little confused on how I will be copying data over from Site A to Site C. Is it just a matter of creating an empty Wordpress shell with no template and copying the data from Site A to it? (And how is that usually done?) Then would I redirect all Site A's pages to Site C's pages, just with the URL changed? I.E www.SiteA.com/large-dogs redirect to www.SiteC.com/large-dogs

I don't want all of Site B either, just about 10 pages from it, would I manually copy them over also, and how would that be done?

Thanks