I have a friend that I'm helping out with some web design. Basically, the guy owns a few businesses that are all complementary of each other and he wants to combine them all into a single site. There's service A and B, based on the west side of our state; and service A and B based on the east side. Each has their own website (eg, eastservicea.com, westservicea.com).
The previous web designer maintained completely separate and unique content, and unique designs, for all four sites. He is now wanting to merge all that together into a single site (statewideservica.com) with a new design.
Right now all four sites are at the top of the searches for his niche market. The last thing we want to do is hurt that SEO. So the debate how do we merge these sites without hurting the SEO.
- Keep the existing URL's and just make the content of all the same.
- Redirect all the sites to the new URL.
- Set a static page on all the existing URLs with content, but all links point to the new URL.
Any thoughts? Not sure this is the best place to ask a question like this, but I don't know of any site with more people that would have opinions on this than Stack Overflow.