IDEA - Good or Bad?

I am responsible for the seo of 3 hotels . They are all in the same area and therefore target the same core keyword - (the area)+hotels.

All sites are well aged and established but very averagely indexed - page 2/3 for most associated keywords. As you might expect it is a very competitive niche.

The thinking is simple - 301 all the sites to one new master site to consolidate backlinks and focus future SEO efforts.

I have the info tld for my main keyword - the usual preferred options are long gone but I have bought this one for 10 years to give it some credibility. The new master site would be thenewurl/hotel1, thenewurl/hotel2 etc... with the individual sites redirected to their own subfolder.

I also have 3 or 4 other related sites from previous seo experiments that carry less weight but could also join the party.

I'm posting this in White Hat because as far as I know this is a legitimate tactic. Let me know if you feel otherwise.

I'd be very interested to know what people think of this plan and (most importantly) would you try it yourself if you were me?

Thanks.

Yes I would suggest to redirect them to one Site. Optimize the start page for area + hotel and make a good landing page with the 3 hotels.
Remember the local search and post the adresses, phone numbers in every yellow books and so one. Local search will be growing fast.

Thanks for the feedback.

So you redirecting the 301 straight to that hotels subdomain, right?

What will you have on the new domains homepage?

What will the owners think about losing the branding of their domains, etc?

It sounds right in theory but I've never actually done this.

HTH .... :cool2:

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Yes, I plan to redirect directly to the hotels own page within the master site. Currently all traffic is from brand related keywords as the hotels obviously list top under their own names. These listings would now be redirected to EDIT: As you typed orginaly (if I try and type it I get hit with auto-moderation so have deleted yours in the quote).

These are not big chain hotels, they are small establishments all owned by one company and I have sole responsibilty for marketing. This is why it can be done - becasue the hotels in question are not in competition with each other but they do share common keyword interests. A quite unique arrangement.

The branding will remain for each hotel and we'll build a basic CMS for each hotel so they can keep the important stuff updated directly without annoying me every 10 minutes I'm also consdering varying the design for each hotel page to further differentiate (although as all sites are currenly built by me they are already very similar).

The homepage will be a overview of all hotels optmised for the overal target keywords (keywords that I can't currently touch due to massive competition from chain hotels and booking agencies).

Remember the local search and post the adresses, phone numbers in every yellow books and so one. Local search will be growing fast.

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Good shout. The hotels are already well established with local search. I'm assuming that doing this will not affect these listings...?

Thanks.

It's a year old so no worries there.

Nevertheless, I'm considering phasing in the redirecting rather than simply all three sites (and a couple of lesser ones) all at one.

What do you think?

what u wana achive with redirects ?
Posted via Mobile Device

what u wana achive with redirects ?

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Thanks for your post. What does this mean exactly?

CrispyBacon said:

Thanks for your post. What does this mean exactly?

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means that gud for short time but for long time that's not gud

i am also not using that because i think that's not gud part in seo.

just my opinion

Fair enough. Having considered the pros and cons I've decided to go for it.

Currently our highest ranked hotel is on page 3, position 2 of Google for my target keyword. I'll post the outcome for future ref.

Thanks.

I am thinking of doing a similar redirect as you. Combining two sights with related content, but am a little scared to go ahead. Please let me know how it goes so that I can put my fears to rest.

I did 301 redirects on a few pages and from my experience it is a waste of link juice. Yes, the 301 redirect is the way Google wants us to do it - however, they remove 30%-50% of the page rank value at the same time (at least that is my experience). Personally I will not follow that strategy anymore unless really necessary.