Questions
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Redirect closed shop to main shop, or keep the domain and content alive and use it for link building?
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paddy_Moogan0 -
Multiple stores & domains vs. One unified store (SEO pros / cons for E-Commerce)
Thank you for your excellent response, Alan. Reviewing my post, I did not explain the situation 100% accurately. Rather than integrating all our shops, in fact we would just be taking one of the shops we run, our main site, and wondering whether to consolidate with two new shops running on two new domains (these domains being excellent keywords). An important point is that we changed the name of the site and domain name mid-2011, to a more international name. At first this clearly had an effect on our Google ranking, although having just had the best Christmas sales ever, we feel this has succeeded. (301 redirects were set up) It would appear that the decision whether or not to integrate now to a unified domain would be affected by this fact. The name of our current main site would not be suitable as an umbrella term for all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colage0