Transcript
Hi guys and welcome to another edition of Zupo SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is about when merging a sites, should I do a redirect or content migration? That's an important question because if you are merging sites or putting two sites together, there are many considerations to be had. So I want to dive a little bit deeper on discussing how you truly merge sites, what pages should be redirected and what content should be moved over.
But before we begin, I do want to introduce the tea we had today. Today we have an oolong tea. It's all in Chinese, so I can't really read it, but I'm pretty sure it's a roasted oolong tea because when I brew it, it tastes a little smoky and it's kind of the very interesting flavor. My dad bought it from a trip from China, gifted me some that he got from China from one of our relatives in China that he had met from a long... It's someone from our clan in China that we... Our family's from Malaysia, but we can trace back our family lines. So when he went to China, he found our family in China and so he was able to reconnect with them and everything.
But I digress. Let's go ahead and talk about merging sites and discussing when you should redirect when you should content migrate. So let's get brewing and talking. So anyways, when you were merging a site, usually you have two different sites. And if you're merging two sites, there are probably some similarities. You might be merging two sites because you have acquired a company that does something similar to you, but they do it a little bit better than you want to acquire them to merge your resources. You just may own two websites that someone gave you and you want to merge the two, like two different blogs that you now want to operate as one blog. There may be many different reasons.
But when you're merging two sites, I would say there's many things that we have to do. And the first two are, are we going to redirect or are we going to migrate content? So when you're merging the sites, I would say, let's start with contract migration first. If you're merging the site and let's say you have site A and site B. Site B is what's going to be merging to site A so site A will still be your website.
If site A has pages that they rank for, that's great. But if site B has similar pages that they rank for, but in addition they have some keywords that site ranks for that your site does not, that's when you have a high probable cause for content migration. And that might be because the site B has content and blog posts and service pages and product pages that a site A does not.
If site B has these pages that they have in their ranking well for them and the contents already there, and they're already ranking on the first and second page, those are a great candidates for content migration. And what I specifically mean there is taking the concept from site B, move it onto site A and create almost the same URL. So sitea.com/... Let's say it's about us, should be moved from site B.
Let me use a better example, not about us. Let's say site B ranked for something like siteb.com/breadsticks, but site A doesn't have that URL, ignores the rank for that page but site a sells pizzas and so they're kind of interested in that. What you would then do is move siteb.com/pizza, take that content, put it on site A, and then put it on URL called sitea.com/breadsticks. That's content migration, where you're taking the content from site B and moving it into site A. So you're straight copying and pasting it over. That's when you would do it is when one, the site B ranks very well for certain keywords that your site A does not.
Or if they have a content library that you could benefit from. For example, if site B already had years of blog posts, there is no reason to take them down unless you have branding and or legal concerns. But generally what I'd say is why delete them? They have all this content. And usually one of the more difficult things for a company to do is to get content off the ground. So I would also say merge content over if it's still relevant to your business. Those are the two main concerns I have or reasons I have for migrating content.
So one is if, especially of a page or URL on that site ranks really well for some keywords. And then second is if they have content that's related to your business and industry, there's no reason why you shouldn't migrate that content over. That's when you should content migration.
Let's talk about redirects though. Redirects or essentially 301 redirecting is when you're telling people this URL does not exist anymore, please go here. Redirect is assuming that you're not going to migrate the content and redirect is fairly simple in that you'll redirect when there is no value to continue to having that URL, but you have a related page.
So let's use the first example. Let's say you have sitea.com/pepperonipizza and site B has siteb.com/pepperonipizza. If site B and site A both rank for it, then you would just redirect it because you already have a page on site A that you have for the same product and service and site B has a similar one. In those cases, just redirect. And so in those cases, just redirect pages that are similar on site B to your site A.
When you're doing that, it's pretty simple. Just map the URLs on site B's site that are most similar to site A. That's for all URLs that do not rank for any keywords and or they don't have any relevance. So for example, siteb.com/aboutlast, you can just redirect to sitea.com/aboutlast. Siteb.com, the homepage can be probably redirect to this sitea.com homepage and so on, so forth.
And so when you're doing a merging of two sites, and that's what I would do, is you need to map out, before you do anything, what will be content migrated and what will be redirected. When you have the two mapped out, then you can do with the site migration. With Google go to search console, Google search console, and submit the site migration And therefore that will be complete.
But the reason why this is so important is doing a migration is simple, but making mistakes is easy. And second, losing out on opportunities is another. If you're merging a different site, whether you acquired it or you own the asset, it has done great work probably in the past. It has blog posts that's ranking for stuff. If you do a migration properly, you will lose all those assets and then you'll start from scratch.
I tell a lot of my clients, you're acquiring these websites and these companies, you might as well get all the value you can out of it because you spend the money to buy them, right? So therefore take all the keyword rankings and the pages and the contents you can to benefit your site as well.
So hopefully that will be helpful when you're merging two different sites. Again, like I said, there may be many different reasons and there's a lot of considerations to be had. This conversation is a very small portion of the bigger migration process. So I would encourage you, if you're going to start this process, go out and make sure you plot out and research the entire migration process.
If you have any questions, just please let us know and I can go ahead and give you some pointers and advice about my own migration projects. But hopefully you guys found that valuable. If you just please like and subscribe, I'm going to go pour out my roasted symmetric oolong tea, and then I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks everybody.