Move from 4 Domains to 1

[5Gates]

Hey Moz Community

We are running 4 domains at the moment.

1. www.rapturecamps.com
2. www.surfcamp.travel
3. www.surfcampbali.com
4. www.surfcampinportugal.com

We started of our business with 1. after a view years in business we got the option to buy the other 3 domains which have ranked quite well with certain keywords. As its quite allot of work maintaining all these websites with two languages, we where thinking of actually moving number 2, 3 ,4 all to number 1.

All domains receive still some good rankings as well as daily hits. So we kinda like would like to keep the SEO Juice. Therefore we where researching for some time what would be the best practice todo so.

For us there are two possible options

• We go trough all posts/pages on the domain 2,3,4 and copy the content over to domain 1. After thats done we create 301 redirects on the domains 2,3,4 linking them back to domain 1 posts/pages. We do do so by manually adding the 301's into the htaccess file, so we are able to delete the Wordpress installations.

• Our we just copy the Pages/Posts from the domains 2,3,4 to the domain 1 and then kill the 2,3,4 domains afterwords, and let google index these Pages/Posts on the new domain. This way we think we would loose the whole SEO Juice from the old domains.

The reason we are asking this one here, we have been reading that this method could lead to red flags at google if we redirect to much Pages/Post back to Domain 1.

Hopefully someone here can help us answer that question.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Set up the redirects to site 1. It won't cause any flags - this only happens when the content is completely unrelated to the sites.

Make sure you redirect each page to its equivalent on site 1 (don't just redirect all to the homepage).

[mcncl]

Definitely go for Option 1: redirecting to the relevant pages on the singular domain.

I would also recommend using subfolders to contain content on individual locations, something similar to rapturecamps.com/bali for Bali information. This would allow you to gain authority for that specific niche and add articles to that niche, rather than having them all under one central holder (the root domain).