301 redirects & merging two sites into one

[Gmorgan]

We have a client that has two sites that rank well for different searches in their market. The main pages ranking are things like advice articles and news pieces.

For various reasons, they just want one site. I believe they need to duplicate the content from the outgoing site and place it on the main site, with a 301 redirect from each old page to each new one.

What happens when they eventually want to redirect the entire domain? Would these smaller, internal redirects become obsolete, therefore removing any link value they once had?

I am not sure how this works or if there is a best practice way to do this.

Thanks

Gareth

[Anthony_NorthSEO]

Hi Gareth,

The best practice for this is unfortunately TEDIOUS. You'd need to 301 each page to the correlating page on the new domain, as well as do a 301 redirect from the root domain to the new root domain.

Redirecting the entire domain won't make the internal 301's obsolete, but will only pass the page authority of the index of the root domain to the new domain. So essentially you'll lose individual page authority from any pages that haven't been 301 redirected individually.

Hope that makes sense and helps. It's tedious, but there are likely some tools out there to mitigate the time involved.

Thanks,

Anthony