This is one of those situations where someone made a decision that seemed reasonable at the time and is now dealing with the fallout, and the good news is it’s not as bad as it probably feels right now. Someone had two businesses in two different cities, each with their own website, each ranking on page one. They decided they wanted to consolidate everything into one new website. So they built a third site, cancelled one of the original domains, kept the other, and now they’re sitting on third page rankings in both cities with the new site while the old one is still inexplicably ranking on page one but the redirects aren’t working.
So what went wrong and what do you do from here.
The core mistake was building a brand new website instead of just transforming one of the existing ones. When you have a site with established rankings and history, that history has real value. Backlinks are pointing to it, Google has been indexing it for however long, it has a track record. When you abandon that and start fresh with a new domain, you’re essentially starting from zero. The new site has none of that history so of course it’s ranking worse. It has no reason not to.
The right move would have been to take one of the existing sites and just add a second location page to it. That way you keep all the SEO equity that site already had and you just expand it to cover both locations. You don’t throw away something that’s working.
But that ship has already sailed a little bit so the question is what do you do now. Here’s the path forward. Keep website three, that’s your new combined site, that’s where you want to end up. Kill website one. And then set up proper 301 redirects from every page on website one to the corresponding pages on website three, and do the same for whatever pages still exist from website two. A 301 redirect basically tells Google and anyone following old links that this page has permanently moved to a new location. The link equity and authority from those old pages flows through to the new ones.
The key thing here is don’t let go of those old domains. You don’t need to keep the websites live, you can completely take them down, but keep paying the ten or twenty bucks a year to own the domain names and keep the redirects in place. Anybody who types in the old URL or follows an old backlink will just get sent to your new site automatically and they’ll never know the difference. And more importantly Google will follow those redirects and start crediting the new site with the authority those old pages had built up.
People get weirdly emotionally attached to wanting to completely delete old websites and domains and I genuinely don’t understand it. Those old domains are assets. They have backlinks pointing to them. Keeping a redirect running costs almost nothing. There is no good reason to just throw that away.
Fix the redirects, let the new site absorb the authority from the old ones, and give it a few months. It should climb back up.
