Best SEO Practice to redirect entire site

[kabbink]

Hey guys,

I used to run two sites selling the same products but with different shopping carts. Site A has about 50 pages and site B had about 2,500 pages indexed due to the way the cart worked.

I now want to point any traffic going to Site B to Site A as we are getting rid of that platform.

I had been told that doing a 301 for every page back to my root (or index.php) could have negative consequences SEO wise but I also don't want to go through and do individual redirects for all 2,500 links.

I'm mostly concerned about capturing traffic from people with saved links and/or emails. Is there a better way to do this?

Hope that makes sense!

Thanks!

[lucy24]

Here it will help to give a more detailed explanation of the difference between the two sites. Do the 50-page site and the 2500-page site each carry about the same number of products, meaning that one page on Site A corresponds to 50 pages on site B?

I have to assume that some aspects of the pages are dynamically created. If so, it may be possible to transfer most of the work over to your php-or-similar. Let it do the lookups and issue the redirects, rather than add 2500 lines to your htaccess.

There's a separate SEO subforum where you might want to raise the why-and-whether questions. Save the Apache subforum for the nuts and bolts of how to do it.

Another aspect of the "how" question is the physical relationship between the two sites. Do they live on the same server? Do both sites pass through the same htaccess? Or do requests for one site pass through the other site's htaccess?

It sounds as if both sites already exist. Other than the redirecting, are you planning any changes?

[kabbink]

Lucy,

Yes - both sites carried the same products but the larger site had lots of variations. Both sites are on different servers, different htaccess files too.

Would it maybe work to have all pages on site B just go to the home page then only redirect the home page to Site A?

[lucy24]

Different servers is good. It means there's no risk of the two sites' htaccess files contaminating each other.

But really, I think you should start on one of the non-technical, SEO-oriented subforums. Don't do anything, mechanically, until you know exactly what you want to do, conceptually.

Questions to ask:

How many genuinely different things are there on each site? How many of the pages on Site B (the big site) have close equivalents on Site A?

Do both sites have value? What are the aspects of Site B that are worth preserving? Do both sites have valuable backlinks?

What changes do you expect and/or want to see in Site A? The transferred traffic from Site B has got to affect it in some way. Good, bad, neutral?

If Site B is completely worthless, you would be better off slapping a flat 410 on the whole thing. And then make a very, very attractive 410 page that enthusiastically points people to Site A. So think of that as your last resort. It's definitely the easiest fix. But not necessarily the best.

[praveen100]

Few weeks ago i did a similar thing. What i did was redirect all the "individual" pages on Site B to the respective page on the Site A. I know it is tough but it is better this way than going around in a loop.
Then, i did the same for the Categories and finally i did it for the homepage.