Redirecting multiple websites to a single website

[daenterpri]

I've been trying to run several truck accessory affiliate websites for a quite a while now. I've recently decided to combine all of my affiliate websites into a single community website. This way I'll be able to focus all my energy and link building into a single place and build up a single brand.

My question is, how many websites do I try to redirect to the new website at a time? Do I need to spread this out? Or is it ok if I move all of my content and websites at a single time?

I have around 30 websites that I could move to this new domain.

Thanks!

Andy

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Andy.  If your 30 websites are all similar content and a similar template you can probably just go ahead and redirect them straight away to the community website, especially if they haven't been performing up to your expectations.

If your 30 websites already have some of their own traction you'll probably want to redirect them piecemeal in order to see how users react to the new, singular website; and to see how the new website measures up in analytics.

[FrankWickers]

You should be able to mass redirect all of the sites at one time, and be fine.  I've done this with a client situation once before, but I'll grant that during that case we redirected only 11 domains at one time.  I can't fully vouch that it will be the same as 30 domains... hopefully someone else may be able to lend their experience with a higher number like  that.

I'd say something else you really want to take into consideration here is do you want to do a domain wide redirect, or a page based redirect?  One would entail far more work than the other, but depending on circumstance it might also offer greater benefit.

With a site-wide redirect, you will of course be funneling everything from the old site onto whatever target page you choose on the main site (likely the home page I'd guess).  When Google notices that a domain has a site-wide 301 on it, that domain will quickly start to fall out of the index, and the link power it had can also surprisingly quickly start to degrade.  Pretty straight forward stuff over all.

If you were to use a page by page redirect method, you could sort of custom tailor what new pages you'd like the old link juice to flow to.  Say on one affiliate site you have a hub page for custom truck grilles, and it has a large amount of links coming into it.  You could specifically 301 the affiliate page to its "sister" page on the main site, which would then boost the target page by a greater amount than if you simply did a mass site redirect.

Even another situation to take into account... If the content across your affiliate sites and main site are all similar, you could use technique #2 with rel canonical tags, rather than 301 redirect.

[Thos003]

Great answer.. +1

But just to clarify:

"the linking power it had"...

Assuming that the old site actually has links, right?

301 Site redirects only seem to help if there are links being redirected with it. A domain with no links does not really offer much, correct?

[FrankWickers]

Quite correct.  I unfortunately assumed that everyone already knows this bit of information.