Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?

[lara_dar]

I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together.

The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page.

My question is:

Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage?

(the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text)

I am in two minds (a & b!)

(a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar

(b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage.

What do you think?

Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)

[AymanH]

Previous answers are definitely the good ones. Focus on relevance more. However you can still add a small popup message (or better module position) explaining the new redirection

[lara_dar]

Thanks for your input, my only concern is that the people looking for the previous homepage might find it a bit odd, but as you say perhaps a message to let people know about the change might overcome that.

Would be interested if others have had a similar experience or other advice on the best way to proceed.

[Chris.Menke]

It's a toss up but I think you should redirect it to the internal page. The relevancy will be better and it's a good opportunity to get a strong link to an internal page. You could have a small blub on that page that welcomes visitors who were redirected to lessen any disorientation from it. Yes, you may lose a bit of branding but those deep links can be hard to get and I think it would be worth it.

[KarlBantleman]

When going through a website migration you should always redirect old pages to the most relevant new page. For me, it doesn't matter whether that is an internal page or homepage. If you redirect the old homepage to the new homepage and the content is not relevant then you are going to have a high bounce rate as customers will not be seeing the right page for their search query.

It may be worth tailoring the design to show people that they are on a new website (sounds daft but users sometimes need the reassurance) and this way they are more likely to remain on the website even if things aren't exactly the same. It is probably a good time to go through your link profile to double check the keywords as well, make sure you have a mix of branded and non-branded keywords (which it sounds like you have already).