Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have two similar projects, which offer real estate. Each project runs under a different domain name and consists of different unique content.
The domains rank well, each on their own in the top 10.
Both have many backlinks and about the same number of. They share some of the sites from which they receive those backlinks.
Now, I was wondering, whether or not the ranking would increase significantly, if I would merge the two domains and continue with only one project?
The number of backlinks taken together, of course, is much greater. Will google look at the total amount of backlinks as all belonging to one site (if the content is identical)?
And how are backlinks affected which come from the same source?
Does anybody have some practical experiences on this?
Merge the content and 301 where necessary from one to the other - you may need multiple 301s, rather than one main one, depending how much restructuriing you need to make the new site navigable! Remove all content from the old site.
The links will follow the 301s, but won't count double, and you'll need to start work on writing to key links to get them to update. You still should end up with an advantage.
In the medium and long term, you'll gain - but there may be short term damage to the stats that the 'losing' site would have had; largely because the move will require some restructuring (smooth one-to-one moves work best.)
Do be sure to check your new navigation (xenu is your friend), and have a user-friendly, useful 404 for any lost pages.
So basically both domains would resovle to the same ip. I would not use any redirects.
My question is: Will all the backlinks count as belonging to a single domain and which one will it be?
