Guys, I've got two domains that are in the same niche and promote the same products. Both sites have good rankings and backlinks. I'm thinking of moving domain2.com to a subfolder on the other domain, like domain1.com/store I would of course use a 301 redirect to redirect backlinks, rankings and visitors. I'm thinking this is a good idea so that all of the link juice for both domains will be pointing to the same domain, rather than split between two. Wanted to get others opinions first, though. What do you guys think? Should I move the sites to the same domain? Or leave them on separate domains? As I mentioned, the sites target very similar (but slightly different) keywords and promote mostly the same products. Thanks!
The link juice won't last unless the links can be updated. Short term you may see a boost. Long term your PR will revert to the prior level. As cheap as hosting is, I would keep them apart if both are paying their way.
I disagree with the statement that it will revert back as if there were some kind of 'expiration date' on redirects and the way they pass PR/Link Juice. Although, having two domains may provide more of an advantage in some circumstances. As long as the redirects remain in place, they will continue to pass page rank. When I put redirects in place they stay forever. If you put the redirects in place just long enough for the new URLs to get credit for all of the old URLs' inbound links and to have the old URLs removed from the index and THEN remove them like lots of people think you can do then yes... as soon as you remove the redirects, the next time they recrawl that link you lose the juice because the crawler will get a 404. However, I do NOT agree with the OP redirecting them to a new subfolder. This will be about the same as what you have now... not much better. If you want to maximize your PR and maximize ranking improvements by redirecting one domain to the other then I suggest the following... Assume you have 2 domains and you are selling almost identical products on each and the sites are currently setup like: http://example1.com/ (100 external inbound) http://example1.com/product1/ (10 external inbounds) http://example1.com/product2/ (5 external inbounds) http://example1.com/product3/ (15 external inbounds) http://example1.com/product4/ (10 external inbounds) http://example1.com/product5/ (20 external inbounds) http://example2.com/ (200 external inbounds) http://example2.com/product1/ (20 external inbounds) http://example2.com/product3/ (30 external inbounds) http://example2.com/product4/ (20 external inbounds) http://example2.com/product5/ (10 external inbounds) http://example2.com/product6/ (15 external inbounds) Now assume you want to collapse the two sites into one domain by 301 redirecting the URLs on example1.com to example2.com. You should ALWAYS redirect each URLs on example1.com to the URL on example2.com whose content most closely matches the content found at the URL on example1.com. If you cannot find a URL on the example2.com domain that matches the content of a URL on the example1.com domain, I always just redirect them to my home page so I at LEAST don't lose credit for the inbound links and get some PR from it. By redirecting each URL on the redirected domain to its most close equivalent URL content-wise on the target domain, this typically helps your rankings because it's more likely the the link text for the example1.com URL will apply to the example2.com URL helping the example2.com URL rank even better than it current does. So typically this means home page ->301-> home page and product1 ->301-> product1 and so on. So what you end up with in the above example after the redirects are in place and all inbound links to the old domain have been recrawled is: http://example1.com/ --> 301 redirect -> http://example2.com/ http://example1.com/product1/ --> 301 redirect -> http://example2.com/product1/ http://example1.com/product2/ --> 301 redirect -> http://example2.com/ (home page since no equivalent product on target site) http://example1.com/product3/ --> 301 redirect -> http://example2.com/product3/ http://example1.com/product4/ --> 301 redirect -> http://example2.com/product4/ http://example1.com/product5/ --> 301 redirect -> http://example2.com/product5/ http://example2.com/ (200+100+5 external inbounds) http://example2.com/product1/ (30 external inbounds) http://example2.com/product3/ (30+15 external inbounds) http://example2.com/product4/ (20+10 external inbounds) http://example2.com/product5/ (10+20 external inbounds) http://example2.com/product6/ (15 external inbounds)
That is what I said and what I meant to say. Now the post just after your reply offers some interesting points.
My experience with 301's has been that as long as they are in place, they continue to pass rankings and PR.