Consolidating Two Websites - URL Issues

Tampa-Photography

This seems to be a fairly common issue, and this post of mine was buried in an old thread, so I thought I would share it here in a more prominent location:

If you have two sites and you want to consolidate to a single site/domain, once your content is moved from Site A to Site B, all you need to do is set up a 301 Redirect from Site A to Site B.

Is is very important that you use a 301 Redirect. This will reroute all of your links, and the search engines, to Domain B, and all of the hard work you have put in building links and increasing your page rank for Domain A will transfer over to Domain B as soon as the search engines re-index your site.

You can also do this just for semantic purposes. If your domain name is too long or hard to pronounce or explain, purchase a simple, nice-sounding domain and redirect it to the long one. That way you can use the nice-sounding one in your advertising, on the phone, etc.

Here is an example:

My marketing site, www.TampaBaySearch.net

is 301 redirected to

www.tampa-bay-fl-search-seo.com

Try it and see how it works.


You can set up a 301 Redirect (also sometimes called a permanent redirect) through your domain host (Yahoo, GoDaddy, etc.) and it is easy to do - just make sure you no longer need the content on Site A before you redirect it to Site B, and make sure you use a 301 Permanent redirect or you risk losing all of your inbound links, and the search engines will index both of your sites instead of pointing everyone toward the one you want to use!

Hope that helps!


Jeff Copeland

Hikin' Mike

I used a '.htaccess' file to redirect old folders to different folders or websites. :ivar