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I have a client that has an existing site, let's call it bobthebuilder.com. My client has been posting blog posts to it for the past couple of years and a modest amount of sites are naturally linking in to it. As a result, this site has a PR of 1.

My client also has another site, again, with a bunch of blog posts, on a subdomain. Let's call it bob.builders.com. This site is rich in information (again, unique to my client) and has a PR of 3.

My client has hired me on to take care of the SEO of his business, not indicating specific sites. I face several options, and would like to get some recommendations, please.

  1. Continue writing and optimizing content for bob.builders.com and leave the other site as is
  2. Do a permanent redirect from bobthebuilder.com to bob.builders.com, lose existing content from bobthebuilder.com
  3. Do a permanent redirect from bobthebuilder.com to bob.builders.com, transfer all blog posts and content to bob.builders.com

What would be the best course of action?

Thank you!

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Don't redirect anything in such a way that loses content. Doing so will only hurt the SEO efforts. #2 is right out.

Does it make sense from a readers perspective or a site maintenance perspective to combine the blogs? That is the question that would determine between your options #1 and #3. Of course implementing the merger and the redirects is a fair amount of work.

If you do keep them separate, would it make sense to interlink them better? It sounds like bob.builders.com might not even link to bobthebuilder.com. Otherwise they would have similar pagerank. It is certainly possible to brand the sites the same with a similar look and feel and much better interlinking without changing any of the urls.

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  • Noted about redirection. I was trying to avoid having to maintain two sites, and figure out which one to concentrate my efforts on. Would it hurt my SEO efforts to transfer content to bob.builders.com and then do permanent redirects on all links from old site? Thanks! – yuval Feb 7 '13 at 23:03
  • You will lose some Juice. Moving sites should be avoided unless its absolutely needed. It could however help the authority on the main site if the content is 100% on the same topic, however as said be careful when doing this... Sometimes you see good results and sometimes it can be harmful.. There's no real way of knowing without doing it, you'd need to tell your client that it has huge benefits if it does, but also can go the other way. You should check the backlinks of both sites and ensure that they are clean!!! no spam, no blog comments etc. Furthermore tell him some juice gets lost. – Simon Hayter♦ Feb 7 '13 at 23:27
  • First off, I really appreciate the input -- thank you! Second, it seems like the easiest thing at this point would be to just to put a prominent link to bob.builders.com from bobthebuilder.com, leave it as is, and concentrate efforts movign forward on bob.builders.com. Could you please confirm that? Thank you! – yuval Feb 8 '13 at 3:20
  • I would probably link to bob.builders.com as part of the template of bobthebuilder.com. Make sure they have the same logo and same copyright. – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Feb 8 '13 at 11:42

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