301: combining many sites into one

[Ntel]

Good morning, everyone!

I have about ten sites that I decided last year to combine into one. To make myself understood, I had 10 sites, for instance:
allsoccer.com
allfootball.com
allbaseball.com
...
that I've decided to bring together in: allsport.com.

Because the original sites were working well, I decided to:
1. List all pages/articles from the initial sites on an Excel spreadsheet
2. On the same Excel sheep, map the desired redirections from each page of the original sites to each of the corresponding pages of the new site (for example: allsoccer.com/blog > allsport.com/blog/soccer)
3. Apply these 301 redirections on each of the initial sites, via the Wordpress Redirection plugin.

My problem: the redirections work, but the ranking of the new site has not felt the effects at all. Worse, it seems that the new site has been penalized for this. No "official" penalties in the search console, but the positions of the original sites were certainly not transmitted to the "allsport.com" site.

Difficult problem! my questions (if you are kind enough to devote a few seconds to them):
1/ Does the community suspect a problem? My two hypotheses:
Either a) the too many "301 links" penalize my site?
or that b) some of the initial sites are identified by Google as negative SEO?
2/ Do you have any idea how to "test" if there is a problem or not?

Thank you so much!

Ntel

[alexmembrillo]

1/ It is unlikely that having too many 301 redirects would penalize your site. However, it is possible that there may be other factors at play that are affecting the ranking of your new site. Negative SEO could be a potential issue if some of the initial sites have been flagged by Google or if they have low-quality backlinks, but without more information, it is difficult to determine the exact cause.

2/ To test if there is a problem, you can start by analyzing the traffic and rankings of your new site before and after the migration. Look for any significant drops or changes in organic traffic and keyword rankings. Additionally, you can check the search console for any manual actions or alerts that may provide insights into potential issues. Conduct a thorough SEO audit of your site to identify any technical or content-related issues that could be affecting its performance. Finally, monitoring your site's backlink profile using tools like Google Search Console or third-party SEO tools can help detect any suspicious or toxic links pointing to your site.

additional steps you can take to further investigate the issue and potentially resolve it:

1/ Review the redirect implementation: Double-check that the 301 redirects were properly set up and implemented. Ensure that each redirect points to the correct corresponding page on the new site. Also, confirm that there are no redirect loops or chains that could be confusing search engines.

2/ Monitor indexation: Keep an eye on how many pages from the new site are getting indexed by search engines. If there is a significant drop in the number of indexed pages, it could indicate issues with crawling or indexing. Use tools like Google Search Console to check the index status and request reindexing if necessary.

3/ Check for duplicate content: Make sure that the content on the new site is unique and not duplicated from the original sites or elsewhere on the web. Duplicate content can result in ranking issues, so ensure that each page on the new site has original and valuable content.

4/ Analyze website performance: Assess the overall performance of your new site, including page load speed, mobile-friendliness, and user experience. Poor performance can impact search rankings, so optimize your website's performance to provide a positive user experience.

5/ Build high-quality backlinks: Focus on acquiring high-quality backlinks to your new site to improve its authority and rankings. This can be done through outreach, guest posting, content marketing, or other link-building strategies. Be cautious of any low-quality or spammy backlinks that may harm your site's reputation.

6/ Seek professional help: If you're still facing difficulties, consider consulting with an experienced SEO professional who can conduct a thorough analysis and provide tailored recommendations to address the specific issues affecting your site.


You have pretty much done everything correctly. What I suspect is that you may have had a bad ranking domain with a lot of toxic links. And while your other websites might be okay this "black sheep" has brought its "disease" on all of them. Thus came the bad ranking for the allsport.com website. This is just a suggestion for you to check what links you have on all domains.

The other hypothesis I have is that Google doesn't recognize the website as a combination of the old ones. And is treating it as a brand new one. This would be bad as you have done what you're supposed to. It might be that it just needs some time to recognize it.

[Crevand]

Some of this just takes time for Google to find and record correctly.
Other things to help speed up the process...
1. Make sure that you have the correct canonical URL on each page... the old pages 301 redirect to the new with the new canonical.
2. XML site map submitted to Search Console
3. Try to find incoming links leading to the older content pages on the different URLs and correct some of these. You can't get them all but try to get rid of duplicates from the same URL... meaning a link on Yelp leading to the new site, a link on Yelp leading to an old URL that forwards to the new URL. Both of those go to the same URL but sit on the same site... this will slow down Google seeing this as a single new site vs. 10 different ones.

Hope that helps, Dan