Moving Product Site Under Parent Domain - Affect Rankings?

Question

We have a site www.product.com which ranks well for its various keywords.
We are looking at restructuring our sites and instead of having a separate site for each product, we are looking at housing them in subfolders all under our company brand.

For example:

www.product.com/
www.product.com/features
www.product.com/request-a-demo
www.product.com/pricing

Will now move to the parent site as:

www.company.com/product/
www.company.com/product/features
www.company.com/product/request-a-demo
www.company.com/product/pricing

If we 301 all the pages of the product site to the new pages on the parent site will we be able to transfer the "goodwill" we have built up and keep our rankings? Will the new pages on the parent site continue to rank in place of those on the old site?

Answer 1

I would be very careful with the URLs you are ranking well for. Yes a 301 redirect will transfer most of the reputation but, a URL change can impact your rankings and search engines will often re-evaluate your page because of this change.

You may see a dip in rankings and then they go back to normal, or even better because of the more logical structure.

Despite the theory, monitor the rankings and revert back if the damage is too great.

I have experienced a logical URL change wiping out rankings of a lucrative key term.