This is a story of recovery, despondency, occasional despair, and a pretty big gamble that paid off. It's the why, the how, and the what of the things you might be able to gain from merging two significant domains into one unified site.
Regular Moz readers should recall WPMU.org from our fairly dramatic Penguin story from 2012 (tl;dr: the Penguin hit us hard, but then we recovered. It was pretty scary).
But all ended remarkably well. After our initial recovery, things went from good to, well, better:
Weekly organic traffic at WPMU.org took a nasty slug, and made a solid recovery.
Parties all round at Incsub HQ. Hell yeah. Let's go hire a bunch of new writers, let's go wild, let's double this next year, etc.
I imagine you can guess what happened next...
Dear Search Lords, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Us So?
Now, usually I'd be the first to see that and say something along the lines of, "well guys, you're clearly doing it wrong."
And in fact that's exactly what I thought, pretty much from day one, so we got bloody busy. Specifically, we:
- Hired some absolutely awesome and highly qualified new writers who took our standards up an absolute ton;
- Spent ages working out quality and style guidelines for copy and media, and followed them like subeditors who had tucked into wayyy too many cans of V;
- Brought in the best guest writers and paid them the best rates in a systematised editorial process;
- Dramatically increased our social and email presence and published stuff that generated it's own awesome links;
- Tried every on-site SEO tactic we could, killed duplicate content, limited and focused our categories and tags, and essentially gave Google everything that she wanted: really quality, fresh, and engaging content.
And yet it was all for naught, we were, to put it mildly, in a hole. Going nowhere fast. We'd tried everything, pulled every string and ticked every box, we were doing stuff better than ever, but still we were failing.
So, we figured, let's do something dramatic. Let's kill WPMU.org and merge it with her sister site WPMU DEV.
This is where I get to insert the video, right? :)
Awesome. Happy now. Moving on.
Why on earth would you kill such a well-known site?
It's a good question, and it's not one we arrived at lightly. Essentially though we were ready to take the punt for a bunch of different reasons, not the least of which being that seven months of declining organic results are enough to make anyone more risk-friendly than averse. But, more specifically:
Latent penguin / penalty Issues
Let's face it, clearly Google had some pretty serious issues with us, and just because we recovered so well from Penguin, that didn't mean we went off their radar, or the strategies we'd been employing (all white-hat, incidentally) weren't falling close to the boundary line.
There was every reason to believe that a hex of some sort had been placed on wpmu.org. It was a monkey we just couldn't shift, and to stretch the metaphor a little, those kinda monkeys aren't in the trees, they're clinging firmly to you day after day.
I always knew I'd get to use this image in a post one day
We had to shake the chimpguin!
Dilution to concentration, juice-wise
Back in the day, I set up WPMU.org as an "independent" site, the main business being WPMU DEV (at the extraordinarily bad, and still bad, premium.wpmudev.org domain).
Same, but different, kinda, look. It's complicated.
And it has been that, we take no affiliate revenue, have no editorial agenda as regards any company outside of us and aim to give fair, balanced and decent coverage to all things WordPress. We're really trying to be the same as the Moz blog, for WordPress.
But let's face it, it's WPMU DEV's blog, and more to the point, we were generating organic links and engagement with a site that wasn't our main business, while at the same time trying to do the same with WPMU DEV. It was a little nuts; both sites had thousands of unique domains linking to them, so they were both moderately powerful. Why on earth didn't we just merge them together, and have one super-powerful site rather than two middling-to-strong ones.
Brand, brand, brand
And last, but certainly not least, there's the small matter of Google and our brand... and if there's a primary lesson in this piece, this could well be it.
Put simply, a search for 'wpmu' or 'wpmu.org' rendered a very different group of results to one for 'wpmu dev':
Somebody's got the SEO right for one of these grabs...
I wonder what the impact of all those high-quality and fresh posts could be along with the WPMU DEV brand? Hmmmmm.
Technical time: merging two domains into one
It's actually remarkably straightforward, here's how you go about it:
First up, download and print this Moz infographic, and keep it by you at all times.
Second, fire up Asana; this will be fabulously useful if you are on your own and even more so if there are a bunch of you.
If there are a bunch of you, sit very close, or jump into a hangout, and (here we go)...
- Decide on the new URL. We moved wpmu.org to /blog/ on premium.wpmudev.org, so it was pretty easy to transfer our staging. (Oh yeah: Get a staging server too, or just set things up with a modified hosts file.)
- Dynamically (or manually, yawn) 301 everything, here's your complete guide to redirection
- Go through your dbase and theme files and replace every link via find and replace. (I.e. replace "wpmu.org" with "premium.wpmudev.org/blog".)
- Test the heck out of it. Give yourself at least a few hours to try pretty much every page (and make some user personas, too).
- Use Open Site Explorer to find the major links to your site, and email whoever wrote the articles or manages the site, asking them to change their links to the new site.
- Test some more.
- Go tell Google using Webmaster Tools (and Bing if you have some extra time). ;)
- Keep a good eye on things, and also run a Moz Analytics campaign on the new setup to pick up Crawl Diagnostics.
- Ask everyone you know to look at the new setup and find issues (they will). Fix them.
- Sit back and wait to see how well it works.
So, how was it for us?
I was expecting that we'd take a hit.
Before the move I'd said that up to a 30% hit would be manageable; we could build back from that, and it was to be expected by the dilution of link juice coming from 301s. Anything more would be a big problem, but we'd battle through.
Here's how it actually went:
Before and after organic shots
On the Monday before we picked up 10,371 organic visits. On the Monday following, 14,627.
On the Tuesday prior, 10,458, and after, 14,546.
The two days taken together were almost exactly 40% up.
Not. Bad. :)
However, we did note that there was no significant change in organic visits for non /blog/* results at WPMU DEV, in fact over the two days (mostly Tuesday) we saw a slight decline of around ~1000 visits (around 2.5% of the overall traffic, but around a 6% variation in the original WPMU DEV traffic), which might indicate that the whole "concentrating juice on one domain" theory might not be the right one.
In conclusion
From this experience we've learnt a bunch of stuff, which I'm going to try to summarize in three main areas.
You can move and not lose, so move away
A well-managed and carefully executed move from one domain to another, or in this case from one domain onto another, can clearly work well.
This is super-important, because honestly, when I brought this up with most people prior to this venture they were very very dubious as to whether this could be pulled off without some serious collateral. When Google says that you can retain your ranking, it's true, you can. And then some.
This may be a successful tactic to escape domain toxicity
The lack of any positive organic bump in the root domain we moved to as /blog/ could indicate that the success of this domain move was not due to the amalgamation of link juice between the two sites, but could in fact be due to the content having escaped some negative/toxic algo penalties that wpmu.org had accrued as a root domain.
However, Google is not stupid. You would expect that they would happily pass along the bad with the good on a 301, and it's often recommended you don't redirect (another thing that was making me nervous).
Branding could be the single most important factor
You don't need to be a multinational; having a relatively established brand like WPMU DEV is enough.
Sure, we're no Moz, let alone a Pfizer, but it could be that moving content from a well-established site (but not brand) to our more-established position is literally worth a 40% bump.
If so, the importance of building and managing a brand alongside your content strategies could well be top of your agenda. At least that's my takeaway... what's yours?
Great post! Regarding escaping domain toxicity through 301 redirects, this is actually a commonly used tactic in the blackhat world. Once a domain is penalized by Google it can simply be redirected to a new domain or subdomain, and the rankings will recover in most cases. However, eventually the penalty will move over to the new domain as well. So if it is indeed the case that wpmu.org was suffering from some sort of penalty, and the increased traffic you're seeing is the result of the 301 redirect, then you may see the traffic drop again after a few weeks (knock on wood).
That is exactly what will happen. I feel bad they didn't know this beforehand. Now they have two domains with a penalty rather than one...
But they recovered from Penguin… doesn't that somewhat bring them back to a neutral ground with Google? Maybe they need a second go 'round of purging those backlinks and using the Disavow tool.
No one recovers from penguin. It's like a prisoner who gets rewarded for good behavior. You'll get some added benefits in prison if you do some good things (disavow + remove links), but you'll still be in prison.
I read a post the other day where Cutts said "Disavow everything if you were hit by Penguin."
You're better off starting fresh on a new site if you have to disavow everything. They should have nofollow linked to premium.wpmudev.org and hid the nofollow links in some kind of javascript so Google couldn't crawl them. Tell users on wpmu.org that "the site has moved - click this link to go to the new site." Not the best user experience, but better than poisoning two domains.
Re: Cutts on disavowing everything...Do you have a link to that post please?
Additionally, I didn't notice anything in the post about asking linking sites to change their links. If they haven't done this, now is the time. Otherwise, I think they risk a situation where the redirect will funnel the link juice from the old domain to the new for awhile, but eventually the extra boost will go away.
It'll be a heck of a task, judging by how many links OSE reports for the old domain, but even getting a fraction of the links switched will help them beef up the link profile for the new domain, and also give them a chance to comb through the profile for any lingering bad links.
Without a doubt-that's a common blackhat technique-you see people 301'ing to try and hide bad links through multiple layers. I do wonder if Google is sophisticated enough to judge intent on some level with these though, certainly from a data standpoint a black hat link profile that gets the 301 treatment looks pretty different than this....at least I'd think so!
Thanks Takeshi, what about if we give it a 302 redirection...? That should work I guess... ?
Please do a followup post in a few months to let us know 'the rest of the story' as I think we are all curious to see if the traffic recedes, stays fairly constant or improves further. Way to sneak in a little spice girls time in there too!
I agree. I'm very curious to see what this does long term. I don't know that I've ever seen a site successfully escape a penalty via a 301 redirect.
I think the overall brands are strong so if anyone has the chance to escape, I'd say you've got a great shot. Anyway, kudos on the bold move. I hope it works out for you.
More than happy to - and it's so far so good as of today...
So we're hoping that if it was a penalty, then it hasn't been passed (surely they would have done that by now, it's over a month after!) .
Or, more likely, this simply the result a proper 'brand' can give... takehome - go work on branding!
Wow, awesome post. Took me about 45 minutes to make it through because I read a lot of the ancillary articles linked to as well, ha. Good stuff, thanks for sharing.
Glad you enjoyed it so much! :)
'read a lot of the ancillary articles' = listened to Spice Girls for 45 mins I assume. We've all been there.
Interesting post. This might work, but I definitely have concerns.
If the main problem with the site is that Google is still not happy with the link profile, then as others have mentioned, the 301 redirects will pass on the bad link data. If this is the case, then the next time the Penguin algorithm refreshes, the new site is going to see a decline. If that happens, you may have damaged both sites.
If the problem was Panda then it's hard to say whether things will be affected again by the next Panda update. Google may see the same quality issues with the new site assuming that you used new content. BUT...it's possible that you've diluted out Panda problems. As a simplified example, let's say that Google is viewing 50% of the pages on the old site as low quality in some way (who knows how they do that, but really, that's what Panda is about. When it's moved to the new site, perhaps those pages only make up 25% of the new site and maybe that will be low enough that Panda doesn't get you.
But, it's also possible that there was no algorithmic issue and Google was just seeing users engage more with sites above the original site and thus decreasing its rankings. It's possible that the new combined site will continue to be seen as a strong brand.
Best of luck!
Very intriguing post -- thanks! It seems like a lot of lessons can be learned. Some of the issues piqued my curiosity, and I'd be fascinated to hear more.
1. As you mention, the old site had recovered from Penguin but then saw a general decline over time even with the addition of all of the commonly-known best practices such as quality content, clean on-page SEO, and social media. This is what almost everyone suggests that websites do for long-term success. So, I'd be curious if you had any more hunches as to what caused the general decline later. Perhaps Penguin was fixed but other algorithmic or manual penalties remained? Did Google send you any specific messages or warnings?
2. This case study seems to suggest that a smaller site with quality domain signals is better for long-term success than a large site with bad signals. Clients have often asked me whether they should just junk their old domains following poor work by (black-hat) "SEO" companies -- and it seems the answer is "yes." But I think it also serves as a warning -- say a large brand has a domain such as acme.com, and they can never lose that domain or move to another. This is clear proof that they should never, ever, ever do anything "black hat" that would risk the entire domain indefinitely! (Not that I'm saying you did!) :)
3. Curious: As long as you were moving to a new domain anyway, why did you keep the "extraordinarily bad" domain rather than create a clean, entirely-new domain and redirect both wpmu.org and premium.wpmudev.org to there through the process that you outlined?
4. I was also intrigued that premium.wpmudev.org had better brand signals (such as the expanded sitelinks) than wpmu.org even though the latter was a lot larger -- any idea why? Perhaps you had Wikipedia entries that discuss the former, Google+ publisher markup, or something else for that specific domain? Perhaps authoritative news sites mentioned the brand specifically?
5. As you also mentioned, you were concerned whether the penalties and other issues would be redirected as well. But it would be accurate to say that this did not occur, right? This is a debatable issue, and I have yet to see any specific evidence or confirmations yet -- so this is interesting!
Apologies for this lengthy comment! I just found this very fascinating and would like to learn more -- I'm sure a lot of Mozzers like myself can learn a lot. :)
Samuel,
On 3, my guess is that they would rather not step away from a org domain. As an organisation, its just a way of getting links in an easier way if you're supporting a 'cause'. I think. Not sure. Rebranding would be harder. Not sure.
Would love to have an answer on that one as well.
1. That we don't really know for sure, especially as we've focused so much on improving WPMU.org SEO with minimal effort put into WPMU DEV. It doesn't really appear to be penalties, possibly just dilution of the brand and content from so many competitors.
2, 5. When you read our previous Penguin article you'll see that we never did anything black hat for WPMU.org. We were unfairly bit by penguin when the black hat people used our products for their own SEO work (maintaining our links). Google eventually made an exception for this (thankfully!). We'll probably never know if there was any existing level of penalty on the old domain. I think the bigger takeaway from this the power of branding and combining brands to avoid dilution.
3. It was scary enough moving wpmu.org blog onto premium.wpmudev.org! WPMU DEV is our core source of revenue, moving that at the same time was way too risky! But with continued success from this move, I think it'll help build the courage to move the whole thing to the root .org or .com eventually.
4. I couldn't really tell you why the difference in brand strength. I think as WPMU DEV is the core site, it has many authoritative links from places like wordpress.org as well as reviews of our products. Also it is much more focused in a hierarchal way to the brand and message. The 572,756+ user generated forum posts is just icing. Joining them both together is giving us the brand power of WPMU DEV + the quality blog content from WPMU.org
In summary, it's all about brand!
Thanks for the reply -- and your last sentence is an important one! :)
Very nice post! I am a big wpmu fan so it made it even more interesting for me to see what exactly happened when you guys merged. Makes me feel a bit better as well on some of my separate brands that would make a much better singular domain. Thanks!
Always a pleasure to hear from a fan :)
I hope that this works out really really well for you.
How long from now do you think you will be able to look back and say with confidence that what you did worked?
Maybe it is a bit early to say?
I'm pretty confident now, but I'll also constantly be reviewing this from week to week, and month to month.
A month later we're going pretty well!
Great Post, It may be really a successful technique.
We have 2 domains which are effected by penguin, though the penguin penalty got revoked but still recovery of traffic and ranking is not up-to the mark.
Reason may be similarity of the 2 different domains, your post can be very useful for those web sites.
Thumbs up for the nice post.
Did you read the Penguin Update article too?
https://moz.com/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update
Luckily we had control over a large chunk of the link profile, but if you're not in the same boat you can always get Google to disavow as many as possible. A painful process for sure.
Thanks for this post! I am in the process of trying to decide whether or not to merge two brands into one, and this article was helpful.
Great story about domain merging! I would be pretty afraid of taking such a risk, thumbs up for your courage!
It was a little nerve-racking and scary, but we're now strengthening our brand so its paying off! :)
Glad to hear! It is always great taking a risk and seeing it pay off. Are you planning on testing other high risk moves?
Interesting to see such a risky tactic pay off in this scenario. Love these blog posts from a creative standpoint as it gets me thinking outside the box as far as how to solve problems for clients. However, it's hard to take much away from this… every situation (website) is so different from an SEO perspective that there's no guarantee this would work for another situation. As the writer feared, this could easily have backfired for a different website duo…
I'd be really curious to see if this strategy ends up backfiring down the road. Smart decision given the relative power of the two domains! But can the wpmu.org site clear Penguin in-time before the merged domain gets knocked down too? We shall see… (or would like to see). Thanks for the post, guys.
It's been sometime now since we recovered from the Penguin update, and I believe we did it pretty well. I'm sure you read our other Moz article:
https://moz.com/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update (May 28th, 2012)
I guess it's going to take some time to see how this pans out though, but I'm pretty confident we made the right move here and we'll continually see growth. :)
I like your story. I also agree with your conclusion that branding is the single most vital factor in company with my content marketing strategies. You have done a nice post WPMU DEV.
Hey folks I just did a domain merge which I was avoiding for a while as I didn't know what to do with the 3 blogs so finally bit the bullet and merged them into my main blog. Still too early to see any impacts but will have to do a deep dive on it in a few months once I have some data.
301 from penalized domain works for a week or 2 but after that new domain gets the penalty too. If You aren't interested in brand building, that's good tactic...
Great... now I've got 2 become 1 stuck in my head.
Thank you for sharing, really glad the big risk worked out for you. With the transition, how problematic did you find getting people who have previously included you in a post/article to change the link to your new site. My biggest fear with this would be losing a lot of good quality links.
Looking forward to hopefully hearing a follow up of your success as time passes.
Interesting... I have been more focusing on micro-sites (multiple sites based on niche or specific products) but unifying seems to have some real advantages.
As a few people said, I think it's a bit early to make any type of substantial takeaway from this until you have more data and more time with the new approach. Sometimes major changes can cause massive swings in rankings, which can go up or down weekly or monthly before they even out.
Also comparing to historical data (same timeline last year) can be helpful as often people searching can vary depending on the time of the year. Often during holidays visits can vary even more depending on your website focus, but also because of vacations people often have different search patterns compared to normal.
Besides traffic would also be helpful to see rankings on important keywords to see if they have improved.
We'll definitely aim to be back with an update, hopefully here on Moz!
Sounds Good!
I followed the instructions. Redirected every page (wordpress site) using a redirect plugin. Then I went to the database files and and did find replace of oldurl to newurl. Problem was that my new website does not have same urls as the old one. The redirects I did with the plugin were over-written by changes I made on the database and pages from oldurl now pointed at non-existent pages on new URL. The lesson is not to do a bulk find/replace on the database.
I was wondering if we could get an update to this post - has there been any change to report?
Good article!
Question: We have two website with similar name in different language or we can says that Country Specific Domains. Now time we have discuses to merge into one website. both language in one website. we want to know it affect SEO Ranking or SEO strategy or not.if we merge into one then it bad or good for SEO?
Hi friend!
it was awesome post! i am also working for cricket website which is affected by recent release of Google update - penguin 2.1. i have removed the spam links and as per your advice i am already working with brand name . but still there is no improvement in my ranking. can you suggest me some tips.
for reference i am giving the project site
https://www.dailyfantasycricket.com
it has less less than 25% of bounce rate, maximum back-links from related sites, focusing on brand name,all the contents are unique but still no results.
Sorry, no can do, not an SEO consultant / firm... join Moz though and I'm sure you'll get some help!
Hey Nice post !!!
Its fantastic information about Domain Merging, its true that whenever domain penalized by Google update it will redirect to another domain. Sometimes ranking of website recovered. I got the brief information about domain toxicity.
Thank you so much for this informative post.
Yeh, I don't know if that's what's behind our recovery though... but I guess if the options are to either trash the domain and start again, then you might as well give it a crack at a 301.
Although as some peopel have commented here - you could end up poising a perfectly good domain, which is pretty scary :/
Cool post! Is it possible Google was associating both your sites as the same brand, and therefore, ranking both in regards to duplicate content? Maybe that's why your traffic increased insanely after Google crawled your site and realized the two are now under the same umbrella?
Similarly, there was that update about brand clumping in the SERPs, which could have interesting applications here: if Google was associating both sites as the same brand, and returning only one for a relevant query, then merging the sites and killing duplicate content allows for the most relevant query to be returned. And it seems that the blog is being rewarded for relevancy. It would be interesting to see also how freshness factors in here.
Naw, there's no dupe content involves here, we were *very* careful about that too - also I think from the sample search google wasn't associating the sites with the same brand, no matter how hard we tried to hint at it.
Fascinating. I hope it pays off but am a little jittery over the 301s. I see here in the UK today (using google.co.uk and google.com) 6 expanded site links for both the brand searches, wpmu and wpmu dev, although they are not the same 6 links. Fingers crossed!
Hi Great post nice to share this, did you loose organic position?
Reading the article will definitely help you out here ;)
Final line says 'every' instead of 'ever'.
Thanks... although now it's up that'd be a Moz editor's job to edit.
Would love to see a follow up post in a month or so to see the progress. Like one of the original commenters, I'm very curious to see if some sort of 'penalty' catches up to the new domain. I hope not as you guys have a legitimate product. Best of luck!
A month later and it doesn't seem to have... which means that either penalties in this case didn't flow (unlikely), we didn't have a penalty (pretty likely), or the value of moving onto the one 'brand' was what did it.
Great post, would liek to know what happens further down the line also :)
Thanks, a month later we're looking good, or even better... I think that as per the scary graphs above, the real story will be 3-6 months.
Excellent post! Regarding getting out of sector poisoning through 301 blows, this is actually a widely used technique in the blackhat globe. Once a sector is punished by Search engines it can basically be rerouted to a new sector or subdomain, and the positions will restore in most situations. However, gradually the charge will shift over to the new sector as well. So if it is indeed the situation that wpmu.org was affected by some kind of charge, and the more visitors you're seeing is caused by the 301 divert, then you may see the visitors fall again after a few weeks
Hasn't happened a month down the track... so I'm betting it wasn't due to us escaping a penalty (after all, we clearly got over penguin in 2012) - it sounds like, from the feedback we've had on this post, that trying this technique to escape a penalty wouldn't be a good idea at all.
Right now my money is on that associating the content with better brand signals is where it's at.
Hey guys, fantastic article! Thanks for all the information. We included it in our Monthly Resource Roundup: https://www.aseohosting.com/blog/2014/01/seo-content-marketing-and-social-media-the-best-of-december-2013/
Cheers and good luck!
Awesome, thanks :)