Have You Ever Split A Site Into Two - And Then Re-Merged Them?

[Planet13]

If you have ever split off a site and then later re-merged those sites, could you let me know your experience with your rankings?

Back in late 2010 I split my single ecommerce site into two different sites (we will say Site A and Site B).

Site A has seen a slow, steady decline in traffic, but DOESN'T appear to have been hit by any penalties.

Site B initially started to grow rankings, but it was hit apparently by a Panda update in March of 2012 and by the May 9th "Phantom" update and May 22nd Penguin update.

I am thinking of moving the ecommerce section of Site B back into Site A to primarily escape whatever penalties I might have.

Also, many of the products CURRENTLY on Site B actually got links when they were on Site A, and I 301 redirected those links to site B. I think it is possible that somehow those 301 redirects are not carrying the same value from Site A to Site B, so possibly changing them back to their original pages might help?

Thanks in advance for letting me know if you have tried something like this and how it worked out.

[JD_Toims]

Interesting.

I haven't done what you're asking, but I think personally the only way I would undo the move to try and get out of the situation you describe is to *not* redirect from B back to A, but rather: add the pages back to A [if necessary], remove the redirect from A, 410 Gone the pages on B.

[Planet13]

Thanks, JD, for the reply:

I think you might be right about that.

there are a FEW pages with a FEW good links, so I might specifically redirect those few pages (from B back to Site A), but the most I will probably end up just doing a 410.

[JD_Toims]

Thanks, JD, for the reply:

NP

Also just thought it might be smart to try a sample [10 or so pages] at first and see what impact it has on the two sites instead of everything at once, because personally, I think if one site's traffic is down protecting the traffic on the other is critical, especially if it's already declining.

[Planet13]

Thanks for the suggestion.

I might be able to do something like that.