Several personal websites moving to one domain - 301 or 302?

[RachelEm]

I feel like I've thought about this so much that now I'm thinking in circles and can't figure this out, so I hope someone can help!

We have a group of physicians who currently practice privately, but are going to become one entity with one website. However, they are going to look like sub-entities, if this makes sense - instead of every practice being "One Practice Medical Group" they'll be "Lakeside Primary Care - A One Practice Medical Group Company," and then the other guy will be "Red Mountain Primary Care - A One Practice Medical Group Company" and so on for about a half dozen practices.

They all have personal sites already, and many are concerned that they will lose any history for their personal sites and will not rank as well in Google as they do right now.

One doctor really wants to keep his own site, and then just have a link on his profile page of the new entity's website. Isn't this counterproductive?

Also, if we do redirect all the personal websites to the new entity's domain, it will pass any page rank they already have, correct? Should these be 301 redirects, or 302 redirects? None of the current sites really have a lot of "link juice" but we're working with several strong personalities who want the benefits of the big entity but the autonomy of a private practice.

[MonicaOConnor]

301 redirects would be best practice. A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect and it tells the engines to continue indexing the old URL. A 301 redirect will tell the engines to send all traffic to the new URLs because the site has permanently moved.

PS, Migrations turn everyone's brains into mush at one point. Hang in there!

[RyanPurkey]

Outside of redirection you might be able to accomplish this via redesign and branding. Still, I'd ask questions like these moving forward...

1. Are their email address going to change? (i.e. from doctor@privatepractice.org to doctor@medicalgroup.org?
2. Will their billing and call handling change? (again, from one to the other)
3. Will they have to present their business as "...part of the Medical Group?"
4. Will the web team be working for the Medical Group or individual doctors?
5. And so on...

Ultimately it looks like the answer is going to be The Medical Group. As such, redirecting the old individual sites to the corresponding section of the new medical group site is the likely conclusion, so individualdoctor.com >> 301 >> medicalgroup.org/individualdoctor.

To ease this transition it'd help you to have a thorough list of all the benefits the new site is going to bring, while also addressing how they can integrate their old work (social media profiles, localized listings, reviews, so on) into the new site.  Any other information that you can provide that shows how The Medical Group has helped promote doctors in the past (if it existed prior) would be good as well.

[EGOL]

Ryan has offered some great ideas.  Lots of those are not normally considered until after the problems hit.

As a general rule, if you merge multiple websites, you unite their strengths and assets.  This is done by placing a 301 redirect on each of the existing domains so that any traffic that enters the site will be redirected to a destination on the combined site.

If you have a main website like LakesidePrimaryCare.com, then each physician would have a personal profile page on that site.  I would redirect each of their former sites to their personal page on the combined site.   If you do that, their personal page will receive the strength from their previous site and help their personal page rank for queries like... "Dr Egol in scranton PA".   (Some benefit would also go into the entire site for any query that they are optimized to rank for.)

If all of the redirects go to the homepage of the site it will give maximum power for the new site rank for "doctors in Scranton PA".  Which might be more beneficial for all but might be less satisfying individually.  (I would want this if I was one of the physicians, but I tend to be a team player rather than looking for maximum individual benefits.)  I believe that this option gives maximum benefit to everyone.

In my opinion, and others will disagree, the old domains must remain on hosting with DNS pointing at them permanently and that 301 redirect must be in place permanently.   This can be done without paying hosting for all of the domains, if you have a server where multiple domains can be routed.  If this is not done any link popularity will be lost.