Merged sites, then unmerged them

[unity100]

Hi people. im new and need advice on something particular.

back after panda/penguindebacle i acquired a number of websites in my interest areas - tech, internet, webmastering, blogging, programming etc. not crappy low quality sites, but ones which were hit by panda/penguin due to old linking formats or algorithm changes.

i had an idea to merge these sites into one site so that they would be more centralized and focused, and have more authority. they had taken hit from the algorithms anyway.

so i did this. merged all sites into one according to their subjects. ie, a tech hardware news related site's content went under the masterdomain.com/technews , webmastering content went to masterdomain.com/internet etc.

i imported content, i properly did 301 redirects and whatnot. even disavowed some bad links.

nothing happened. traffic didnt improve. neither search traffic, or otherwise. actually in some cases, it went down. this lasted for ~1.5 year or so. site was not actively promoted during this period though.

then i decided to unmerge these domains, since it didnt work. and it could be better to have focused sites - one about webmastering, one about tech news, other about programming and whatnot.

so i unmerged them with proper redirects, moved contents, paid attention to not have any duplicates and whatnot. metas are ok, linking is ok, everything according to guidelines.

interestingly traffic on these newly reinstituted sites didnt change at all even after some months. whatever search traffic the website about tech devices news was getting under the section in the mastersite, is still getting similar traffic back on its own (old) domain.

did i do bad with merging? did i do bad with unmerging? what's the consensus and experience on these?

[unity100]

So no one has any experience with this then?

[goodroi]

not crappy low quality sites, but ones which were hit by panda/penguin

If a site was hit by panda & penguin that is Google's way of saying it is a low quality site. Merging or unmerging the site is not going to improve the quality.

Let's say some sites have many poor quality articles with less than 200 words written by a child. Merging sites with 100 low quality pages into one mega site with a thousand low quality pages doesn't make the site any more valuable to the user or attractive to Google.

If you have a bunch of sites that have many worthless spammy links and you combine them into one site, you still have a weak profile. 0+0=0. 0-0=0.

If you want to fix panda & penguin issues you probably want to focus on raising your quality standards. Some people merged sites because after they finished pruning away the low quality, they had anemic websites. So they merged just the high quality leftovers into a new site. Some people that did try merging sites did not have good results because they did not prune enough low quality and did not raise their quality standards enough for the new work they did on the site.

[RedBar]

did i do bad with unmerging?

How long ago was this?

[unity100]

@goodroi

If a site was hit by panda & penguin that is Google's way of saying it is a low quality site. Merging or unmerging the site is not going to improve the quality.

sites werent of such low quality. tech blogs, webmaster blogs that had good following back in their day. all pieces are unique and written over durations like 3-5 years.

@redbar

How long ago was this?

merging was like 2 to 3 years ago, unmerging was just a month or so ago.

[RedBar]

unmerging was just a month or so ago.

These days G is very, very slow at updating "new" or even revised sites, at the moment it seems to be taking a minimum of 6 months, obviously popular news sites seem to be doing better however for regular sites it is very exasperating.

[unity100]

i see. then what you are suggesting is that i should just wait and see.