Merging two websites can be a danger or a resounding success

Merging websites, experiences and results

Today's topic is something special, I have several experiences in terms of merging websites in recent months and the truth is that each one has been different.

Some of you have also asked me about the fusion method, how to do all this so as not to screw up in terms of positioning.

Let's start with the first question:

Why did we merge two websites?

There are different reasons to join and unify two websites into one. Most of the time it involves the combination of a website for informational purposes and a website for commercial purposes. For example, we have the typical company that manages an ecommerce on one domain and a related blog on another parallel domain.

This is quite common, especially in e-commerce, the purpose of the merger is multiple and has several advantages, especially when the blog has traffic and authority.

First of all, we unify the authority of both webs so that, by redirecting one of the two domains to the other, we are going to transfer part of the authority it possesses to it.

This implies that the inbound links that the domain that is being redirected had, go to the domain that remains. If done well, it generates very good results.

Another reason is to take the traffic we have in one domain to another that we want to improve. You already know that traffic is always a positive sign to determine if a website is attractive to the user or if it is not.

But there are times when we have no reason to grow, we are simply forced to merge one website with another because in some way, one absorbs the other. Imagine a company that closes or that is transferred to another. Well, the logic is that a merger takes place so that people who search for the name of the company that closes end up arriving at the company that bought or absorbed it.

Given these motivations, we are going to explain what we need to take into account and how to execute a merger in the right way.

How to merge domains without losing positioning

We are already clear about the remaining domain and the donor domain, now we are going to see the appropriate steps to make everything a success.

As the theory is always very royal, I'm going to explain it to you with a very recent example that I have, the merger of the domains labarberiaonline.com and barberiaonline.com

At the beginning of August we had the opportunity to buy one of our competitors' websites in the barberiaonline.com project, you know the e-commerce of beard products that I manage.

**The point is that it was a domain with a much greater authority than ours, it had traffic that we were dreaming of and a tremendous number of keywords ranked. **

We closed the deal with the owner and within a week we had the whole shed set up. I'm going to explain step by step how I did it.

• The first thing we need to do is a matchmaking task. Something very heavy but essential if we want everything to be perfect. We analyze the website to be merged URL by URL and decided on a redirect destination for each of them.
• In this case, it wasn't just a product URL, we had to match main pages, ecommerce categories, blog categories and blog post.
• As our blog contained some articles with a similar or similar theme to those we were going to migrate, we began to merge the contents or replace them with those that we considered to be better in terms of drafting and quality of the content. We generated all this in text documents so as not to put duplicate content on the web since the domain to be merged was still online.
• Once we generate the document with the source and destination URLs, we pass that information to redirections. Something that we would later dump into our htaccess file.
• The moment of truth. On a Thursday at 12 p.m., we redirected the domain to be merged to point to our domain. We dumped the redirects to the htaccess file and replaced the posts to be merged with the contents we had prepared, published the ones we didn't have and finally the website was redirected.
• Once this is done, from Search Console, we have an option to inform Google of a domain change. We carry out this procedure.

So far it would be the process and the truth is that everything went perfectly.

What happens when you merge two websites?

If everything went correctly, traffic comes instantly. The content placed by the donor website redirects to the website that absorbs it and has no greater mystery.

In our specific case, I followed quite intensively the process by which Google begins to replace donor URLs with new ones and here I found several different cases that will surely surprise you, because they left me perplexed.

First of all, we had publications that were new and that we had created simply to not lose the positioning and traffic of those contents. For example, the donor website had content that was “Beard Dyes”. We didn't have any previous content with that theme, so we created a post with the content of the donor website, optimized it in the same way and redirected it from one to the other.

What happened is that on the first and second day, the URL that showed in the Google results was that of the donor website. We clicked on it and it redirected us to the new URL with the same content on our website. All normal and correct.

Two days after the change was made, Google replaced the old domain with ours. It was something direct, so there was no longer a 301 when you clicked on that result, you directly arrived at the post in the new domain. Very fast, two days. And this happened in the rest of the contents with the same process.

However, not all URLs were replaced, in fact some took up to a month.

LET ME TELL YOU ANOTHER OF THE PLEASANT SURPRISES WE SAW DURING THIS PROCESS.

One of the main keywords we fight for is ** “Beard oil” **, a keyword that throws at the product category in our store but that on the donor website I was positioning for a blog post.

Our intention was to make transactional or highly product-related KWs go to the business side, so we took all the content that was in the post from the donor page and integrated it into the content of our product category page.

**What happened?... I'll tell you right now. **

First I have to tell you how we were positioning ourselves for the word “beard oil” on the product category page. We were precisely oscillating between position 15-11 on the second page of Google, far from traffic you can imagine. However, the donor website post that was ranking for the same word, ranked 7-8 on the first page.

We knew that we could ruin this good positioning of the donor page if things went wrong, but we had to try. As I mentioned before, we merged the content of the donor page with that of the product category and redirected one to the other.

The result after 2-3 days was that nothing moved. We were still in the same positions. It wasn't until the 10th that we saw the first advance.

The two URLs continued to coexist in Google's results even though they both pointed to the same content. The donor page had the URL ranked 8th and we had jumped to 10th place for the first time with the category URL. Google was deciding what the fuck to do with those two results that arrived at the same destination.

**It wasn't until the 15th that one of the two results disappeared, ** obviously that of the donor website and the positioning of the category URL improved, rising to position 6. We were already playing the castanets, a success for the strategy, but I insisted on improving that so I reoptimized the Title of that category using that of the donor web, so that it was better suited to the text content the user reached.

Every month we jumped to position 4 and 45 days after the merger we reached position 2 for one of the most complicated and most trafficked keywords in our niche. A success.

We have done this monitoring process with certain URLs that we consider to be priorities and in all of them we have found very similar results: significant improvements in positions, increased traffic and new long-tail words.

Some things to consider to make the merging of the websites a success

Our case worked out well, but because at all times we have complied with some procedural bases that I will list:

• Thematic relationship between the donor website and the final web: if we merge two or more domains with different themes, things can take much longer to stabilize.
• Content assignment strategy: as we have seen, it is important that we know what we are going to do with URLs or content that do not have their namesake on the receiving website. Mergers, new creations, or 410 redirects are the possibilities.
• Millimeter-controlled process: You've seen it, URL to URL. We control everything from the beginning to the phase of absorption and change of URLs by Google.

And this is the process for merging two or more websites. There are a number of more technical steps, at the level of domain redirection that are more complex to explain and that if you are interested you can ask me through the contact form.