I have just merged 3 different blogs.

All the blogs covered a related niche - Software Testing, but from very specific aspects: programming, automating, technical testing.

Rather than maintaining 3 blogs I decided to convert the existing domains to landing page sites, and move all blog content into a single place.

Why have a single blog?

My thinking was:

• easier to track with Google analytics because it is one site
• easier to control SEO because blogs were on Blogger
• more consistent formatting and templates
• easier to ‘upsell’ from content because driving traffic to a single site

The hardest part of all of this are the redirects required to avoid using the existing cached google indexing.

Subdomains provide long term options

Fortunately, I used subdomains to cover the blogs e.g. blog.mydomain.com rather than mydomain.blogspot.com

• this allows me to have blog.mydomain.com point to my landing page site
• and have .htaccess files redirect to my merged blog

.htaccess redirect code

The basic .htaccess redirect code looks like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.mydomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(/feeds/posts/default)$ https://www.mydomain.com/blog/mergedblog/index.xml [R=302,NC,L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^(feeds/posts/default)$ https://www.mydomain.com/blog/mergedblog/index.xml [R=302,NC,L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^$ https://www.mydomain.com/blog/mergedblog [R=302,NC,L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.mydomain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=302,NC,L,QSA]

The above covers a bunch of things for me:

• redirecting the RSS feed /feeds/posts/default
• redirecting the home page to the main blog index ^$
• redirecting actual content to the moved url on my merged blog ^(.*)$

Make sure you test it

I’m now going through the testing process to make sure it all worked.

I’m using a manual process and link checking tools to help.

Next Steps

The next steps are:

• rewrite the old sites to be landing page sites
• update all the SEO on the merged blogs to better harness the content

I’m taking the view that a single ‘hub’ site with most of my content, and having spoke landing page sites, will provide a more controllable site eco-system and improve my SEO abilities.