Redirect closing established site to another established site.

[Tuurbo]

We have 2 ecommerce websites with duplicate product/category content that have been around for years. "Site A" since 2004 and "Site B" since 2011. "Site B" doesn't generate many sells and we want to close the site in fear that it may look spammy to google and since we don't want to upkeep the site.

Couple questions:
1. Is it possible that "Site B" has damaged "Site A" with google since they are so similar?
2. Can i 301 redirect all of "Site B" to "Site A" without hurting "Site A"?
3. If question 2 is ok, should i use the "Change of Address" tool in google webmaster tools to point "Site B" to "Site A"?

Thanks!

[FedeEinhorn]

You can redirect the site safely as long as site B doesn't have any algorithm or manual penalty applied, if it does, redirecting the site will actually redirect the penalty too.

If you are sure you don't have any penalty, then you can apply a 301 to site A and also notify Google of the URL change.

As for the first question, if the content is exactly the same then any of the two could be suffering an algo penalty, in that case, a 301 should "remove" the penalty as the content is no longer duplicate on 2 different sites, but published only in 1.

[Tuurbo]

Thanks for the response!

I can see neither site has a manual penalty according to google webmasters tools, but is there any way to see if either site have some other penalty, through a tool or something?

[FedeEinhorn]

Daniel,

Unfortunately, there isn't any tool that can tell you if you received an algo "penalty". The only way to know is looking at your organic traffic, if you see some drop from one day to another then you probably did. In any case, algo penalties are applied and removed in the same way, just fix what you think caused the issue and then wait