Merging two niche sites into third larger site

Quick question about merging sites for you seo types. I have two fairly small niche sites on similar topics that actually do quite well - rankings are stable(ish) and each send a respectable number of RMP's a month (for mini sites).

I want to merge them together with some additional content to form a third larger site, but there's some overlap between content so I'm not 100% sure of the best way of doing it.

Here's what we have:

Site A - Gets the most traffic and RMP's, but content isn't quite as good and also a bit out of date (was written years ago and forgotten about)
Site B - Gets less traffic/RMP's, but has higher quality content
Site C - Doesn't exist yet, but will be a new much larger site

So with regards to the overlapping content, should I:

1. Redirect Site A, let it get indexed on the new domain, then replace (or merge) the overlapping content with the content from Site B and set up redirects from that domain.
2. Redirect Site A and keep the old (worse) content, redirect Site B's non-overlapping content
3. Redirect Site B (better content) first and let it get indexed on the new domain, then redirect Site A but keep the content from Site B where there is an overlap
4. Redirect both sites and just use the better content from Site B where relevant

Anyone had any experience with this kind of set up?

just an idea mate, if both sites generate players and have rankings why not leave them where they are and create a 3rd independent site. then you can keep the original rankings and then go after more/other rankings with the 3rd, plus you can use each site for a link to others in your network

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Originally Posted by thebookiesoffers

just an idea mate, if both sites generate players and have rankings why not leave them where they are and create a 3rd independent site. then you can keep the original rankings and then go after more/other rankings with the 3rd, plus you can use each site for a link to others in your network

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The two sites are very very similar and I think they'll work better together. I'm also very surprised that the weaker content one is ranking where it is because everything about it screams that it shouldn't be there (small site, thin content, no links) and if I'm honest I think it'll eventually just tank.

Tbh I'd been leaving them as two separate sites for the past few years for that very reason but my spidey sense tells me a change may be afoot in the not too distant future!

there has to be a reason why google likes site a... see if you can find out what it is that makes it rank higher than expected.
however, if you can't find it... if google wants site a, don't **** against the wind and improve the content on that site a i would say :)

i have no experience with merging sites together , although it crosses my mind once a while.

I recently did just this. My love to build things gets carried away at times and I ended up with a few to many sites that I don't really have time for. So to solve this, I combined them into one larger site. Like yours mine did have some overlapping content as well, but here is my advice.

First off, don't move them both to a new domain.. You will want your main domain to be somewhat established. IMO the smartest thing you can do is make the site currently getting the best results with traffic your main site. Then take your second site and import it into your first site. So for me I have monlinecasinos.com and I wanted to add my US facing site casinoally.com into it.. So I created monlinecasinos.com/us and i moved everything under casinoally.com to monlinecasinos.com/us then did a 301 redirect from casinoally.com to monlinecasinos.com/us for every file (use the same link structure and you can do it all with one code in the htaccess file of your old site . )

About a week later it had raised my rankings for the entire site and pages that didn't rank before now do. But to keep things fresh and Google happy, along the way I did a pretty large content refresh on some of my older pages as well. That was a few months ago and the site is still holding strong.

i'm wondering, would there be a limit to merging sites into each other? i got so many outdated mini sites that i could all merge to one bigger site... i can imagine that if you redirect one site into another it should give no issues. what about more than one, does anybody have experience with that? 2? 3 maybe? :)

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Originally Posted by yeahfree

i'm wondering, would there be a limit to merging sites into each other? i got so many outdated mini sites that i could all merge to one bigger site... i can imagine that if you redirect one site into another it should give no issues. what about more than one, does anybody have experience with that? 2? 3 maybe? :)

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What do you class as mini or small? a few pages or a few hundred? and do the domains make sense? are they niche targeted can they be fused? My thoughts is put all smaller sites into one larger site.. especially if they are not doing much but in the process give the old pages a quick refresh by adding some extra content, you could effectively create one larger authority site, I agree with Ryan you should use the best ranking domain if possible and redirect the rest as it has history and trust.

If you do a really good content refresh.. I would see no problem with it. I was trying to keep my answer simple, but in my case monlinecasinos.com was a domain that was doing fairly well (plus i really like the domain name) so i converted casinoally.com (us facing site) to monlinecasinos.com/us and casinoally.co.uk to monlinecasinos.com/uk

As you can see they are both ranked fairly well for new additions. We are a few months in, the DA carried right over without issue. If you are doing more then one... Do one at a time... See how it does, and if its showing positive signs do another maybe a few weeks/month later.

I can't stress the content refresh enough.. I think it will make all the difference in google seeing your site as updated vs trying to pull something funny.

Plus its good for you, update anything outdated.. Add a new paragraph here and there... Seems to really help.

In my case my sites where a few years old... A few hundred pages each (maybe 150-200?)