I own two sites, both are related and on the same topic but one is an e-commerce shop, the other is informational. The shop makes 10 times more revenue per visitor than the other informational site, but the informational site has 10 times more traffic and shedloads of inbound links. Just out of curiosity, what would happen if i did a 301 redirect the whole info site to the shop, and merge the two. Would all the pagerank (4) and precious link juice pass to the shop and bring in more visitors and rankings? Is this method ever used, or are there any google penalties for this? what are your thoughts?
Will it increase my rankings by much though? The info site currently brings in about £400-500 a month so i don't want to loose out on that if its not going to work, what would you recommend i do? My info site has around 35k links in yahoo so i dont want to ruin my chances, but the link keywords used are in most cases aren't completely relevant but on the right topic. For instance, say i'm selling cars, keywords are for repairing and looking after cars, is this a problem? lastly, is this reversible if it doesn't work? Thanks for your help btw
It's totally within your rights to do so... If you do it then a 301 redirect is the way to go. However, IMO I would leave well enough alone. The links pointing to your informational site likely have link text that is not as applicable or relevant to your ecommerce site's pages. It is the link text associated with those inbound links that drastically affects rankings... not so much the link juice that is passed. PageRank/link juice is keyword phrase agnostic. Simply passing your ecommerce site additional PR is not going to help it much if any if the link text of the links being 301 redirected does not contain the keyword phrase that the target page on the ecommerce site is trying to rank for. In otherwords, if you have a page about "apples" on your info site, most of its inbound links might be using link text like "apples", "red apples", "macintosh apples", etc. Redirecting this to page on your ecommerce site about "oranges" is not going to help the ecommerce site's ranking for "orange" related keyword phrases. Yes it will slightly increase the PR of the ecommerce pages, but I doubt you'll see an increase in rankngs if the redirected page and target of the redirect are not relevant to one another. Other webmasters are more likely to link to your informational site than to your ecommerce site because they find it informative and beneficial to their site's visitors. If you 301 redirect the info site to the ecommerce site, all of the old informative pages from the info site are going to disappear. Also the sites that link to the info pages are sending visitors there for information on a particular topic and now will be sending them to your ecommerce site. It's likely going to be a bad user experience if you redirect to your ecommerce site because the users are expecting info and instead they are getting a product page. These people will likely not convert well because your product pages are NOT going to provide them with the info they are seeking. They are likely at a different stage of the sale cycle. If I owned a site that linked to your info site and I discovered you were redirecting to your ecommerce instead of providing the info that you used to for my site's visitors, I would drop your link and change it to link to a different site that provides similar info to what your old info page used to provide. IMO I would leave both sites running. Figure out how to monetize the info site better. If you have a page on the info site about "green widgets" then link to your green widgets product page on your ecommerce site with a contextual link in your "green widgets" artical on the info page. Place an ad for your ecommerce green widgets in the sidebar of your "green widgets" info page. IMO this is a much better approach than collapsing the two sites into one.
Thanks for taking the time to reply Canonical, appreciate it. I think i'll stick to how i'm doing it now then. But maybe sell some info ebooks or something on the info site instead. Tbh i thought i'd keep the info site running but thought it was worth asking to gain a bit more info on the matter. Didnt want to miss out on all that mulla Thanks again.
With a 301, the link juice should carry over. Goog says it might take a few weeks, but it will happen.
You must be real patient, because that 301 link juice pass takes really long time. But if the target domain is already ranked, that could do only better for it.
yeah the current ecom site ranks quite well and is on first page for a lot of keywords, but the other is 1st-2nd for most of its keywords. I just dont want to loose that £400-500 month income, but on the other hand if i had that traffic for my ecommerce site i'd be a very happy man It's my only income also so its a huge risk...
No matter how relevant they are. Search engines don't punish any 301 redirection. It will definitely help in getting better rankings. But it takes a very long time like 6-12 months. If you are focused in getting better rankings for specific keywords, those keywords should have in the name of redirected domain. For example, if you have shoes.com but if you want to get ranked in shoe, you should buy shoe.com (ideally with all TLDs) and redirect it to shoes.com Of course, "shoe" in anchor texts of the redirected domain's backlinks is important. But anchor texts can not help as much as the keyword in the name, shoe.com/net/org..
you may want to tread cautiously here. You may want to redirect the appropriate informational pages from the PR4 informational site to the similar informational page on the ecommerce shop site. Start with small groups of pages, not for the entire site redirect in one go.