Page aggregation

Hi there,

I need a little brainstorming help.

We have a customer in the travel industry. This customer offers each of their trips under a separate URL, which contains exactly the keyword and the travel destination. As in the example here:

Page 1 URL: keyword-destination1.xyz
Page 2 URL: keyword-destination2.xyz
Page 3 URL: keyword-destination3.xyz
Page 4 URL: keyword-destination4.xyz

Each of these pages is number 1 in SERP. The individual pages are highly optimized on-page, do not have a particularly strong backlink profile and have a medium to strong competitive environment. The very good ranking probably only comes from the on-page optimization and URL with the keywords, I think.

The customer would like to include even more destinations in the future and in this context combine all existing pages under a new URL.

I think there are various solutions here, but I am having a hard time finding the best way.

How would you proceed to avoid a significant loss in ranking for the keywords?

Cheers,
TTE

TTE said:

The customer would like to include even more destinations in the future and in this context combine all existing pages under a new URL.

Click to expand...

They want to remove all individual pages and replace them with one?

Very bad SEO move.

Warn them that loss of rankings is guaranteed.

Single page will not rank for all locations like they hope.

Location changes context tremendously.

For example, keyword "travel united states" is very different contextually than "travel germany" or "travel india".

This is a very horrible idea.

Why would you mess with something that is working perfectly and ranking first already?

Once the whole thing is amalgamated into one website, Google takes over for preferential rankings and you don't have any control.

Having 200 destinations as sub pages and ranking all 200 subpages is a big dream.

Even if the pages were cloned and properly 301'd, the whole thing could go kaput in a matter of hours.

tiiberius said:

Single page will not rank for all locations like they hope.

Click to expand...

Oh no, I expressed myself wrong. They want to summarize everything under one domain. However, each destination should get its own page.

BlogPro said:

This is a very horrible idea.

Why would you mess with something that is working perfectly and ranking first already?

Click to expand...

From a marketing perspective I can really understand they want to do that. They started with only one single product years ago but now they have a lot of itineraries they want to showcase that.

TTE said:

Oh no, I expressed myself wrong. They want to summarize everything under one domain. However, each destination should get its own page.

Click to expand...

You mean each keyword has its own domain right now, correct?

Uniting them under a single brand/domain is fine then.

This is a website migration.

I would personally build the new website with brand new content

Then link from the current domains to their respective pages on new domain.
For example:
keyword-destination1.xyz > newdomain.com/keyword-destination1/
keyword-destination2.xyz > newdomain.com/keyword-destination2/

Give it some time and make sure the search engines recognize this connection.

You can list all domains, current and new one inside company's social profiles and other places too to reinforce the connection.

After that, redirect the domains to their new pages completely via 301 redirect. (not homepage. but individual pages.)

I suggest to checkout this video for website migration :

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tiiberius said:

You mean each keyword has its own domain right now, correct?

Uniting them under a single brand/domain is fine then.

This is a website migration.

Click to expand...

Thank you, mate! Yes, that is exactly how it is.
That helps me a lot and confirms my own thoughts.

Then link from the current domains to their respective pages on new domain.
For example:
keyword-destination1.xyz > newdomain.com/keyword-destination1/
keyword-destination2.xyz > newdomain.com/keyword-destination2/

Click to expand...

As I understand you right, you would recommend to leave the content from the current domains untouched and only place a link to the new domain until the new domain is well indexed and start to rank well. Correct?

And after that, in the second step, the I'll setup the 301's to the individual pages.


The video was also very helpful and interessting. Thanks again!

TTE said:

As I understand you right, you would recommend to leave the content from the current domains untouched and only place a link to the new domain until the new domain is well indexed and start to rank well. Correct?

And after that, in the second step, the I'll setup the 301's to the individual pages.

Click to expand...

Yes, exactly.

Only create contextual backlinks between them first.

And use unique content on both.