Here's a question from Rob in the Netherlands.
Rob asks, Can the change of address feature in Google Webmaster Tools be used to merge two sites?
Site B becomes a part of Site A, or is it used limited tomoving a site from one one domain to another?
Do you have any advice for successfully merging sites?
Well, the change of address form is intended to be movingfrom one site to another site, so I wouldn't recommend that you try to be merging a bunch of sites or taking that sort of approach.
If you do want to successfully merge sites, here's what I recommend. Suppose you have two sites A and B, and you want to take A and merge it with B.
If you log into Webmaster consoles and prove that you own Site A, you'll be able to see essentially the full exhaustive link of all the links that we know about.
You can download as a tab or comma separated value list of all the links that come to Site A.
Now look through that, and you don't want to necessarily write everyone who has ever linked to Site A, unless there's only like five or six people.
But you can say, okay, who are the important people who link to Site A?
Maybe there's blogs, maybe there's new sites, anybody that's reputable that you think has high page rank, and then I wouldsay, okay, write to those people and say, hey, site A and Site B are merging.
The new page will be not here on site A, but here on site B.
Would you mind updating your link and a lot of those high page ranked people they want to have good links.
They'll be happy to update their link and point to the new part on site B.
Then you want to do a 301 redirect from every page on siteA to the appropriate part where that page is on site B.
So don't just do a three or one redirect from an individual page on site A to the root level of Site B.
Do it from whatever the URL is on site A to whatever the URL is on site B.
That way, someone who's landing on the old page will land on exactly what the new page is going to be.
So in essence, you're looking around at all the backlinks to Site A, you've downloaded the full list according to Google, and you can look at the ones according to Yahoo or Microsoft as well.
And you're trying to identify the important ones that you really care about and make sure that those definitely get rewritten. And in the meantime, you can go ahead and putthree or one redirects in place to merge.
Merge those sites. So that's roughly how I would try to merge two differentsites that you purchased or two sites that you have.
Maybe you purchased one and you're moving them to a new site.