Hi, guys, I'm looking for some advice, pros and cons, about this particular topic that has been on my mind for a while now: I run a site, my main site, which gets pretty good hits; but I also run two separate blogs, both on the same industry, but on two different niches of that industry. Both blogs are in the same field as my main site, but they are news blogs, daily updated (every day), and with new, fresh content all the time. The thing is this: I have both blogs on their own domain names, and I'm thinking about merging them into one. But I'm not sure if I should merge them into one blog on its own domain name, or merge them into one blog, then move them over to the main site under a "blog" subcategory/directory. My main site is pretty established, and as I said, gets a lot of hits. But the two blogs have just entered Google thanks to the most recent updates, and I've seen a doubling of traffic in the last month alone. My preference is to merge the blogs and move it over to my main site, as it would be more convenient to not have to keep track of different blogs, servers, etc. So, guys, what are the pros and cons of moving the blogs to my main site, or leaving them on their own domains? P.S. I've been giving this more thought since my blogs are starting to kind of cross over into one another's niche, and I'm feeling a bit constraint by having to keep each blog "confined" to their own category. Plus, one of my blog's host is acting up, and has been ever since I moved to them. Apparently they have me on a server that keeps crashing due to another user who keeps f**ing with the database. What I would like is a lot of opinions, advices, and experiences on my dilemma. I really don't know what to do, and would really like some outside perspective on the pros and cons of this potential move... I guess what I'm worried about here is the negative effects of re-directing the blogs to a new, merged blog. My thought is that since my main site is ranked very well in Google, I would get the benefit of being constantly spidered by Google and thus all new blog entries would show up on Google higher parallel to entries in my main site. Or something like that.
You are asking from a seo point of view, so maybe your post should 've been better placed in that forum. However, since your blogs are only just added to the google index, you won't loose a lot when you move them. When you don't get them a new dns, and you place them on the main site they will be crawled instantly and you won't loose big credits. If you move them the best way would be to set a 301 redirect from *every* page from your old blog to the new page. I think there may be a problem, because redirecting all pages won't be so easy i suppose. You can move your blogs to the main site, if you are capable of integrating them enough. If they have a different layout etc. i wouldn't place them on my main site. I'd rather merge the two blogs into one. If you merge them you can also choose to let one live and just put the other one into it. Then you don't have to take care about the one that just stays and saves you time. If you have the two blogs on a different domain you can always read the rss feed with magpie and create fresh content on your main page. As long as it isn't too much you won't get hurt for duplicate content. Be sure to interlink the blogs and the main site, so you will get credits from both. So far for me, i don't know if you're gonna have a lot more replies here. Succes!
From an SEO point of view, I would keep the sites separate. You can link from your main site to your blogs to improve their ranking, and also direct traffic to the blogs. You can also link from the blogs back to your main site using javascript links and NOFOLLOW to avoid a cross-linking penalty from Google. But the real benefit is when you get another site, you can link from 3 sites, rather than just one. From a maintenance side, it sounds like things are becoming a bit of a pain. Firstly, get your host to move the site that is constantly crashing to a new server. If they won't do that, then it is new host time. If maintaining the separate sites drags down the quality of the sites, then you aren't going to get the SEO benefits anyway and you would be better off combining the sites and concentrating on the content.
Personally, I would say maintain their separate presences for the time being. Google has their "Blog Search", which really exists, IMO, to separate blog content from other content - and therefore keep blog content out of the regular serps. Who knows how aggressive that kind of a thing can get in the future - and whether or not they'll separate your blog content from your regular content or just stick your whole site in the blog search. I'm not trying to be chicken little here. I'm not making any claims to know anything special. I'm just saying that three web sites is better than one and the maintenance hassle is worth the potential penalty of melding them together.
My preference is to merge the blogs and move it over to my main site, as it would be more convenient to not have to keep track of different blogs, servers, etc.
It shouldn't be much of an inconvienence keeping track of different blogs and servers, etc there's only two servers.