Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We came to the conclusion that it would be better to combine the companies and the sites into "Site A". We are planning on putting all of the content from Site B onto Site A and setting up a 301 redirect for all of the various pages and then a catch all redirect from SiteB/* to SiteA/index.html. Is this the best way to proceed? Could we see any penalties from adding content so quickly?
As for adding too many new pages too fast - how many do you need to add? You usually don't get into trouble unless you are way up there, either with real numbers in the 5 figure area or a serious percentage increase over the level a site was at, like going from 400 to 5,000 in one jump.
There are other factors that will come into play, such as the trust levels of both sites and whether either one has seen backlink funny business recently.
I was SEO advisor for a redesign that completely restructured the company's main site and also moved numerous products from smaller satellite sites onto the primary site.
The transition went more smoothly than we dared to hope, and I credit the techies who made 301 redirects for close to 2000 individual URLs. They did such a thorough job that nearly every drop of link juice was salvaged and sent to the equivalent new page. We didn't explain anything, we just redirected, trusting the page content to make it clear that the user had landed in the right place.
The spiders were happy too. Rankings remained stable for important search terms, and some even improved, presumably because of better on-page optimization. The new URLs began to replace the old within a week in Google. Yahoo took about a month, often showing both old and new URLs for a while, with MSN somewhere in between.
