Hi all, A client of ours has 5 domain names with 5 websites and is being advised to combine all those 5 websites into 1 big site on 1 domain. The question we have been asked is can this be done without loosing the search engine history behind the 4 'redundant' domain names? Example: If the client owned www,blackshoes.co.uk and www,bluesocks.co.uk could he point these domain names at landing pages on another domain - such as www,bobcom.co.uk/black-shoes and keep the search engine goodness that comes from having 'black' and 'shoes' in the domain name? It's a bit of a head-messer but any advice would be appreciated.
But wouldn't keeping the main site (in the case of the example www,bobcom.co.uk) and linking www,bobcom.co.uk/black-socks through to www,blacksocks.co.uk be a better way of keeping the search history for www,blacksocks.co.uk? The site branding could match across all domains with the advantage that because the keywords 'black socks' are in the domain name the search results would be higher than www,bobcom.co.uk/black-socks?
By "point" I hope you mean 301 redirect. If blackshoes.co.uk ranks well for the keyword phrase "black shoes", it's likely because the domain is an EXACT match for the search phrase. "black shoes". This site can probably rank well for the search term "black shoes" with very few links because of the big boosts sites get when their domain name EXACTLY matches the search phrase. The high odds that other sites linking to them would use "blackshoes.co.uk" and "black shoes" as the link text would also help insure this site ranks well for "black shoes". The same applies to the "bluesocks.co.uk" site and how/why it would rank well for "blue socks". Even if you move the blackshoes.co.uk and bluesocks.co.uk sites to www.bobcom.co.uk/black-shoes and www.bobcom.co.uk/blue-socks, respectively, by implementing 301 redirects, the new pages on bobcom.co.uk will likely not rank nearly as well as they did previously because they will not get the huge boost the previous sites received for having an EXACT match domain name. The old domains will be removed from Google's index and replaced with the www.bobcom.co.uk/black-shoes and www.bobcom.co.uk/blue-socks URLs. By 301 redirecting the web pages on the previous sites to the bobcom.co.uk pages, those new pages on bocom.co.uk WILL get credit for all inbound links to the old domain. If a significant number of the old domains' inbound links have "black shoes" and "blue socks" as the link text then the new bobcom.co.uk URLs might still rank decently well since they will get credit for that link text. Whether or not the loss of credit for the exact match domain names causes the new pages to rank the same or lower than the old pages will mostly depend on how competitive the phrase is (this assumes that all on page factors - title, h1, h2s, content, etc. - for the new pages are identical to the old pages) and how much weight the exact match domain name was carrying in those site's overall ranking for "black shoes" and "blue socks".
Domain name containing with niche keywords.By using the niche keywords we can optimizing our website properly.
Thanks Canonical, this is exactly what I was after. I feel that using a 301 redirect of the domain will have adverse effects on the SEO rankings so need to keey the current domain names in use. We are going to develop a website that routes to all the domains and has a single CMS system running it.