Consolidate Multiple Sites Into Brand Website

[AinsleyAgency]

Hi Moz Community,

I am looking for some advice and/or guidance on consolidating multiple sites into the brand website. At the moment, we have our brand website as well as keyword matching/topic matching websites for each service. (Note: We're a professional services firm). The service websites do rank well for their keywords, but it's my hope that the single brand website will create a more unified presence on search.

We have just about completed our re-design (consolidating the service websites into the brand website), but before going live, I wanted to reach out to the Moz communtiy to seek advice on things like 301 redirects, submitting sitemaps, etc. This is the first time I am consolidating existing websites into an existing website, so it's a little daunting.

Thanks

Tim

[katemorris]

I don't blame you, this could be a large undertaking. Things i would recommend:

1. Make sure you know what the top pages are all on all current sites in regards to external links. You need a list of all pages that have external links and where those are from. You need to get as many external links changed as possible.
2. Redirects are paramount of course. 301 redirects across the board. The content should match or be very similar.
3. In a week or two after launch, check to see how many internal links are linking to old URLs. Do this by crawling your site and fixing any internal 301 redirects.
4. Once you've confirmed the redirects are in place, submit the old sitemaps and the one new sitemap. It forces the SEs to visit the old URLs to find the redirects and also find the new URLs. In a week, remove the old sitemaps.

Those are the first things that come to mind. This is a good resource as well https://www.branded3.com/blog/website-migration-guide-building-an-seo-checklist-for-moving-your-site/