Redirect closed shop to main shop, or keep the domain and content alive and use it for link building?

[Colage]

Hello,

We used to have two shops selling our products, a small shop with a small selection of only our best quality products (domain smallshop.com), and a big shop with everything (bigshop.com). It used to make sense (without going into full detail), but it's not relevant anymore, and so we decided to stop maintaining the small shop, because it was time consuming and not worth it.

There is some really good links pointing to smallshop.com, and the content is original (the product descriptions are different between both shops).

So far, we just switch the "add to cart" button on the small shop into a link to the same product on the big shop, and did links from the small shop to the big shop also on categories pages.

So the question is: in your opinion, is it better to do that, keep the small shop and content alive and build links to our big shop, or do 301 redirections and shut down completely the small shop ?

Thanks for your opinion!

[Asif.Dilshad]

Hello Leana,

As you said both shops have different product description but adding more content is not a bad idea either.  Move the content of smallshop to relevant product pages of bigshop so that you won’t lose (do not replace just add) your quality.

2^nd, adding 301 in domain level seems to be logical to transfer full authority instead of some links from smallshop (or sitewide link).

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi Leana,

Thanks for the question.

If you're not updating or maintaining the small shop subdomain anymore, it would make sense to move all of those products/content over to the main domain and then 301 redirect all of the old pages to the appropriate new ones on the main domain. This feels like the best long-term approach given that you will be focusing your efforts on the main shop.

This can carry some risk though - migrating URLs and content can confuse search engines and you can sometimes see a temporary drop in traffic even if the migration is perfect.

I'd suggest testing the move first and move over a few products from the subdomain to the main domain, make sure you're comfortable with the process and then do more after that if it all goes well.

This should help consolidate everything (including link signals) into the main domain and help long term.

I hope that helps!

Paddy