How to merge two sites
I currently have two sites and two URLs, which I would like to merge into one site and one URL.
How do I tell Google and the other search engines that the content is not being duplicated, and that one of the sites and URLs no longer exists ?
Do I do a 301 redirect ? Google has this to say: "If your old URLs redirect to your new site using HTTP 301 (permanent) redirects, our crawler will discover the new URLs." I wonder if I should do this, because the URL I want to use is not new, it has been in use for about two years.
Or do I start by having one of the sites completely removed from Google. Google says this: "If you wish to exclude your entire website from Google's index, you can place a file at the root of your server called robots.txt. This is the standard protocol that most web crawlers observe for excluding a web server or directory from an index."
I am confused. Can someone who is sure what to do please help ?
Neutron2k posted this at 15:01 — 13th December 2005.
He has: 113 posts
Joined: Jul 2005
I personally would not over worry about this. In the long run, it is somthing that needs to be done.
Using the 301 redirect is the best way to go about it. Google doesnt state that you have to move the content to an absolute new domain. Just copy the documents over and setup a 301 on everything that has moved. Shouldnt have any problems, especially if you use google sitemaps along with an XML sitemap.
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