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Ask the Experts: Should I Consolidate Sites for SEO?

October 1, 2012
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: We have two different businesses: catering and personal chef. Over time, we’ve ended up with two sites for these services. Additionally, we’ve purchased other domains and have them redirecting to the main sites. The personal chef site is not ranking well, but there is a personal chef page on the catering site that is ranking well. We are thinking about building a new site and condensing them into one, but are worried we may lose the traffic that the old personal chef page had. What can we do to retain this traffic?

A: First, a quick note regarding your parked domains: These are probably neither helping nor hurting the SEO presence of your main sites. But one good reason to keep control of these domains is so they won’t be be snagged up by competitors and used to compete against you. Be sure to re-point any redirects if you do decide to move your sites.

There is no single, definitive answer about whether or not to consolidate your two sites to a single site. Here are a few pros and cons of consolidation that may help guide you:

PRO: consolidation of authority & trust signals such as social sharing and inbound links will tend to make a single, unified website have more power in search engines than two separate sites.
PRO: a unified site makes online word of mouth more straightforward. Good reviews of one arm of your business will reflect well on the other arm.
CON: a unified site will need to compete with focused sites that can specifically optimize for each of the specific services (personal chef vs. catering).
CON: A unified site is probably less likely to have the opportunity to get links from lists or directories of one or the other service.
CON: You have an existing rank that you are legitimately concerned about losing. A 301 redirect from the old page to the new page is highly recommended, but even with that, it’s possible that the rank will suffer.

If these two sites truly are two separate businesses, with a different customer base, different service offerings, and having different conversations online, then it probably makes more sense to retain the separate sites (while linking between them, naturally).

If you do choose to unify, re-using one of your existing domains would be best. Is the catering domain name general enough to house both businesses? In that case we would recommend keeping the page that is ranking well (personal chef) at the same URL that it is currently on, and redesigning around it.

If it is not possible to re-tool the catering site so that it encompasses the personal chef site, and you feel a strong need to move both sites to a new domain, be sure to follow the page redirect recommendations we discuss in “Oops, I Redesigned my Website. An SEO Checklist.” A key point: you’ll need a 301 redirect from the existing personal chef page to the new URL. So,

www.example1.com/personal-chef/ should 301 redirect to www.example2.com

However, even if you do everything right in a move such as this, you should be prepared for a drop in search rankings. Like ripping off a band-aid, the pain will probably pass quickly, but it is not impossible that your site would suffer long-term ranking drops from moving domains, so we only recommend moving sites if absolutely necessary.

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Google’s Pirate Penalty – Any Changes Yet? [Updated]

September 20, 2012
by Gradiva Couzin

Over a month ago, Google announced that it would be adjusting its algorithm to reduce the presence of sites that have had a large number of DMCA takedown notices. We haven’t seen any changes since then, have you?

It’s rare for Google to announce an algorithm update, and even rarer for Google to make a change that is designed to please content creators in Hollywood, but that is what happened in early August 2012, when Google told the world that it would be adjusting its algorithm to penalize for copyright violations. Search industry insider, Danny Sullivan, dubbed it the “Emanuel” update, and those of us who work in the search space for entertainment clients waited eagerly for big changes in search results.

We haven’t seen any. Have you?

[UPDATE: October 26, 2012. We rechecked the ranks and continue to see very little change. Only two sites dropped out of the ranks, and these were not major players:

iwannawatch.net – 5 ranks last month

4shared.net – 4 ranks last month –]

Out of natural curiosity, and because of our role working with entertainment clients, we wanted to know the effect of this algorithm change. A couple days after Google’s announcement, we ran a rank check for about 35 search queries that are likely to bring up pirate sites. These included “watch movies online” and “direct download movies” as well as keywords including specific film names.

Not surprisingly, we found major pirate and torrent sites running rampant in Google’s results. Sites like Pirate Bay and isoHunt showed up in top-30 search results for the vast majority of the terms we tested.

Two weeks after Google’s announcement, we ran the same rank check again. We expected to see a drop in the presence of pirate sites, but there was almost no difference, as you can see in the before-and-after comparison, here:

(The drop from 254 to 234 in the total top Google positions for these pirate sites is well within normal ranges of rank fluctuation.)

What gives, Google? Is this the extent of the change you announced, or is the algorithm change still yet to come?

Admittedly, our search terms were focused on a single slice of the industry, Hollywood movies. If anyone else has documented a shift that we’ve missed, post a comment and fill us in – we’d love to learn about it!

Ask the Experts: Should I Consolidate Sites for SEO?

Google’s Pirate Penalty – Any Changes Yet? [Updated]

Over a month ago, Google announced that it would be adjusting its algorithm to reduce the presence of sites that have had a large number of DMCA takedown notices. We haven’t seen any changes since then, have you?

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