
How to Merge Websites Together for SEO
Have you rebranded recently or acquired a new domain? Then you may need to merge websites, but you need to do it carefully to maintain your SEO rankings. Below are some of the best practices that a skilled SEO team should follow to merge two sites successfully. Why Merge Your Websites? Before we dive into how to consolidate your sites and content, let’s examine some of the reasons you need to do it: You purchased another domain, and you want to blend the content from both sites. You own an outdated site with followers and authority, and you want to merge it with a newer website. You need to rebrand your company with another URL (perhaps as the result of a broader, company-wide merger or acquisition). Are you in one of those categories? Then you’ll need to merge your sites carefully to ensure that you have the best SEO results. How Does Merging Sites Help SEO? Merging two sites together can have the following SEO benefits, if done properly: A powerful, authoritative site can pass its authority to a less-known URL Two sites with mediocre SEO authority can be combined to create a more authoritative, industry-dominating presence Two authority sites can target a greater number of keywords, significantly improving rankings for many more keywords than the individual sites alone The best case studies for website mergers include a 1+1=3 scenario, where the combined quality of two websites can create a higher authority site that ranks better overall had the site’s remained separate and single ranking entities. As we’re fond of saying: A site ranking in position 0 or 1 on Google is worth infinitely more than two owned sites taking up 20% of page 1 rankings without the top position. If combining two sites could mean improving rankings to high positions and removing some pages out of the index, then the effort is very worth the cost. Strategy To Merge Websites Below are the steps you need to follow to merge your sites for the best SEO results: Perform a Comprehensive Audit Your comprehensive SEO audit should include a review of the following: A complete backlink audit between both sites, including the creation of a disavow link list for nefarious links as well as comprehensive updates to internal linking strategies. A full content audit, taking into consideration the content overlap and cannibalization potential between the competing sites. Some pages on either site may need to be removed and replaced by existing and better ranking content on the corresponding site. This is a tedious task that can take a great deal of time. A review of all title, H1, meta descriptions and other areas critical to your rankings success. Create a NEW, Combined Sitemap When you make a sitemap of the site you need to merge, you’ll obtain an inventory of every page. This is what you need to make sure that you include every page you need on the new or merged site. Design The New Site Well When you are merging an old and new site, you want to spend time and money to ensure the new product is one that you’ll be pleased to show off. So, as you design your new site, pay close attention to load speed, mobile-friendliness, attractive design, and simple navigation. Take The New Site Live Before you merge the sites, you should ensure that the new website is working correctly. If you don’t pay close attention to this critical detail, you could create many problems with the new site. Map All URLs It’s important to use your old sitemap to determine where you want the URLs on the new website. This part is a pain in the neck, but you’ll need to do it for a successful merge. Also, this is how you will make a 301 redirect list, mapping pages 1-to-1 to the new site’s equivalent page or updated page. Update Your Internal Links It’s also vital to alter every internal link on the new site. When the new site has links to the old one, remember to convert them to your new URL. Move The Old Site You’re almost there! Now you need to move the old site to the new one. If it’s a small site, moving it at once will alert Google to the move, which will lead to the search engine indexing your pages quicker. If you have a big site, it’s fine to move things by section, and you can correct problems as they occur. Make 301 Redirects With your old sitemap and the new one, you can make the 301 redirects that ensure that the power of the links on the old site will go to the new one. Update All Robots.txt Files On the old website, you need to take out every robots.txt orders or directives. This ensures that search engines can find the new redirects on the new website. The new site should be made so that the robots.txt file lets search engines crawl the site. As part of this process, you should tell Google that you’re changing your site address. Provide Sitemaps To keep the site merge going, you need to give Google the old and new sitemaps. This will help the search engine find your redirects. Watch Your Site’s Indexed Pages You can use the index coverage report at Google to see which pages are getting indexed. Mistakes To Avoid When Merging Sites Now that you understand how to merge sites effectively for SEO purposes, let’s look at what not to do: Failing To Weigh Risks Merging or migrating sites usually occurs because someone made a high-level decision somewhere. But these folks may not be tasked with running the site or SEO part of the business. Unfortunately, this means that all of the implications of merging sites may not have been considered. The most significant risk is that site migration can cause a reduction in web traffic. If you follow best practices, this risk can be reduced, but it still may