SEO Question

[davids]

I have a SEO related question to pose to any of the experts that may frequent the forum... nothing of extreme importance, so if no one can answer, that's fine! Feel free to post whatever thoughts you may have anyway.

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Say I have the following,
CommonA.com - ranks #1 for Common A
CommonB.com - ranks #1 for Common B
CommonC.com - ranks #1 for Common C

If I merged all three sites together to a new site/domain, at for example:
CommonXYZ.com

Would I continue to rank #1 for the three previous terms (assuming I did the proper 301 redirects), and if I did, would I also rank higher for the term Common?

If not, what's the best way to rank for the term Common (on an existing or new site) using my existing sites.

 

[jam]

As ranking with the exact domain name is much easier you will likly lose your no 1 ranking.

CommonA.com is ranking for Common A but if you change the domain name you might find that you may be ranking lower.

The same backlinks and content on CommonA.com and the same for CommonB.com, when searching for keyword "Common A" the CommonA.com domain will rank higher.

Depending on how strong your backlinks and onpage seo is you may be able to make CommonXYZ.com rank 1 for Common A, Common B and Common C.

If your site has had no off site seo done it is most certain that CommonXYZ.com will not rank 1 for the other keywords.

Take this advice lightly as I don't know the keywords, seo that has been done on the websites or quality of competition.

 

[FirstPageResults]

I would develop XYZ and send inbound links from A B & C to make it seem as thou XYZ is the authoritative source.

This way you won't risk losing any existing rankings.

 

[Timmy]

I would develop XYZ and send inbound links from A B & C to make it seem as thou XYZ is the authoritative source.

This way you won't risk losing any existing rankings.

Agree completely. I even host my 'feeder sites' on a different server - not sure if its necessary though.

 

[davids]

I would develop XYZ and send inbound links from A B & C to make it seem as thou XYZ is the authoritative source.

This way you won't risk losing any existing rankings.

That's what I was initially thinking, then I remembered reading somewhere about merging multiple sites into one and gaining a better overall rank, but that was long ago and I couldn't find anything similar again when I checked recently.

 

[sooner]

Agree completely. I even host my 'feeder sites' on a different server - not sure if its necessary though.

Having a different IP address for each site is said to help. Makes the links seem more legitimate. Not sure how important it is, but it's on the to-do list for campaign site/traffic site development from most SEO "guru" types.

 

[James]

Well my advice is not to do it, sure doing a multiple site 301 using htaccess to one domain will pass over link juice and some ranks.

But in terms of keyword targeting it is advisable to only target 3 per page, on your index page you want to target 9 possible keywords down to 3. Sure you cna deep link to internal pages but imo its better to run over 3 different sites on different IP's as said above.