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Hello Pat, I do not have experience merging a Ruby site with another type of site, but I think we are confusing issues here anyway. You can have content in a database that gets served up anywhere. That is, you can pull that content into ten different websites if you wanted to. The database issue is almost irrelevant to the SEO issues, which have mainly to do with loss of pagerank from URL changes, and possible duplicate content issues. A 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one would take care of both of these issues. If you are unable to redirect all of the old content my suggestion would then be to figure out which URLs have external links and redirect those. Let all of the other ones return a 404 or 410 status code so those URLs will be removed from the index since the content will exist on the new URL and you don't want two URLs with the same content indexed simultaneously. Please let us know if we have missunderstood the question or if we can provide more help with your original question. You may want to post your Ruby question in another thread to ensure the right people see it. Thanks!

Right, that is my hunch as well. But Marketo tracks a conversion as a form fillout. So if somebody reaches the reg page and fills out the form, and reaches the thank you page it should record a conversion in marketo and google analytics.

Hey Pat, Good question. Firstly, well done for being involved with two very high Domain Authority sites. However (get ready for cheesy quote) with great power comes..... etc. Strictly from an SEO perspective, 301ing pages from the specific product site to the main domain will transfer about 80-90% of the authority. You should see an increase in DA when you do this. However because DA is an exponential scale, it's difficult to say by how much. I would definitely do it, making sure the pages are 301'd to equivalent pages on the main domain, not just the home page. I'd do this because it's easier to expand the content, and target new keywords. However, the question you need to ask yourself is, "Is it the right thing for the brand?" especially as you have loyal followers for the specific product. Hope that helps Iain - Reload Media

If you use a collapsable div or CSS to hide the text, it should be absolutely fine. View the page with JS and CSS turned off. If you can then read all the text, then you've done it correctly.

You could have a model box appear on the page which contains the form (example: http://ui-patterns.com/image/2042/0/0/614) you can strip out any boxes which close the modal box, you could also put a delay on the box appearing so wait 10 secs so they start reading then modal box. When they fill out the form and click the submit button a cookie is stored locally saying 'done'. Next time they visit the site the website check to see if the cookie done exists, if so don't show box, if not show box.

Yep, that'll work!

Hi Irving, No we had 0 PR outreach pointing to these other domains. Each site had VERY minimal external links that were very outdated. Good to know about the rankings. I was really hoping that I would see a boost but just glad we fixed the problem.

The link tracking is using a 301 redirect so 99% of the juice will be passed along to your page. As Jason said OSE has a slight lag with updating their index. Try out http://www.majesticseo.com/ for additional link information. In my experience they tend to update their fresh index more offten. Good luck - Kyle

I'm late to the party but just wanted to say thank you for this. I've been discussing PR with a colleague and this has helped me to make a few decisions which I was stalling on.