Moving Page and Maintaining Rank

Question

I own a domain "adjectivetopica.com". I have a page, "Adjective TopicB" at url "http:adjectivetopica.com/adjective-topicb" that consistently ranks in the top 2 for a google search of "Adjective TopicB" and similar modifiers of TopicB. More than 90% of the traffic on the domain comes from this one page. I don't rank in the top 100 for the "TopicB" alone and am not expecting to.

I am developing a service at a new domain "mysaasapp.com". In addition to the service this new domain will have blog content and other articles that are related to "Adjective TopicB".

I would like to move the high ranking page to "mysaasapp.com/blog/adjectivetopicb". I can do this and setup a 301 redirect.

If I do so, do I have to leave the content exactly as it is? Can I change some of the content on the page and reference the saas and other related content on the site? Will doing so negatively impact the ranking?

Is there a better way to move it that will drive the traffic to the saas up page and maintain the search ranking?

Answer 1

The 301 Permanent Redirect tells Google and other search engines that the page has moved. It is no longer at the URL which returns the 301 Status but at the new URL redirected to.

For search engines, this effectively tells Google that links to the old URL is equivalent to the new one. This is the arguable most significant component which determines ranking but is not the only one. A change in domain has some impact so you may not necessarily get exactly the same ranking. Since this is PageRank, elements on the page also have an influence on ranking this is because while links provide an indication of popularity, the content on a page is used as an indicator for relevance.

Once you change the contents of your page, you risk affecting the relevance of your page for some keywords, so be sure that any change you make are good for your readers and SEO, keying page structure, keywords, contents as close to the original as possible.

Hopefully you have Analytics setup on the old and new page so that you can monitor. Since anything SEO is hard to predict you should do things in small steps. Move the page as is and monitor traffic over a month (at at least a week if you have a high-traffic site). Then change it and monitor traffic, if you had no drop after the 301 and have one after the change, then you know what caused it. If none can be seen, then your changes are most likely good.