Merging multiable sites into one

[Online18Casino]

Merging multiple sites into one

I have two sites that I will be merging into one. No idea how this is going to affect rankings and seo but I'm tired of writing content and feel like breaking something today

Has anyone had experience merging multiple sites into a single large sites? Its not just that simple, there my issue gets a bit more complex.

site backgrounds:
I have my new site onlinecasinos411.com that I will be merging with my old site: onlinecasinousa.co

onlinecasinos411.com - 5 months old, a handful good backlinks (15), pretty good content (will be keeping).

onlinecasinousa.co a PR3 site, with almost every level 1 subpage PR2, lots of content, a few years old, but kicked out of the serps by the penguin update. This site is pretty much dead with traffic, however it used to rank good.

I never had a warning in WMTs or anything, and my link profile is pretty good with a handful of large spammy sites that have sitewide footer links (from a theme I made and put online). But the footer links are in like 7k pages, a lot having to do with payday loans.

I have tried contacting the webmaster, no response and I don't trust the disavow tool. PLUS, its a dumb domain name anyway, so why not kill it off? This way, if the penalty (or whatever you call it killing my rank) does follow over, I can work on one site instead of two.

I will be moving over most of my content, 301ing page, etc. I am interested in seeing how it goes. If interested ill update this post along the way to see if I can get onlinecasinos411.com ranking using this method.

Has anyone else tried this before? Feedback welcome...

 

[Guard Dog]

I have never tried this at all. Are they Wordpress sites? If so, there are multiple WP management tools that would allow you to manage content from a central location very easily. Just a thought.

If they aren't, then yes, you definitely have to be very detailed on your move over to keep from losing rankings. I know there will be some losses no matter what you do, some 'link juice' and probably some missed pages.. but you should be able to minimize that with a detailed approach.

 

[Online18Casino]

Yes, all Wordpress sites.

I plan to 301 redirect every page individually with a plugin, as I hear its better then to 301 all at once from .htaccess Plus I have some posts and permalinks are set up a little different, so I guess I would have to 301 those individually anyway.

In the past I turned a forum into a coupon site (onlinecasinoforums.co to casinocoupon-codes.com) that ranked right away without any problems. Still holding its spot a year later after domain with the 301 expired 3 months in. This I would think is a little different, especially with the loss in rank in the authority site.


............. And I spelt the title of this thread wrong.. multiple.. ???

 

[Online18Casino]

Maybe I do just redirect from htaccess?

Am I allowed to
Redirect 301 / domain.com

AND redirect most of the pages that way, (keeping the same url structure) While redirecting some of the posts individually?

Ex:
Redirect 301 / domain.com
Redirect 301 /post-2 domain.com/post2

or am I not allowed to do that?

 

[Online18Casino]

I forgot I had posted this... Here is an update on my results so far incase anyone wants to try something similar..

It seems my main problem was my link profile, to many anchor texts the same. Merging two sites together seems to help that as now I have a much more diverse link profile. The extra PR from the USA site has brought my 411 site up to result 11 in google for 'online casino reviews' this is from page 8.. and my old site that was #1 for 'online casino usa' then gone completely from the serps for about 6 months is now back on page 6 for that keyword (but to be fair the main page is no longer about that subject, so its ranking on the anchor links alone).

No PR update yet, but opensiteexplorer gives my 411 site much more authority then before, combined authority of both sites now.

So... seems to be working so far.