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SEO: merge of 3 different sites into one will result in loss of organic traffic, but how much? 100%?
Merging 3 different web sites into one will be expected to reduce organic traffic. However, with 301s assured for all pages, and content properly migrated on the new domain, how much traffic can be expected to be lost? 100%? 70% 50%? After what time the traffic is expected to recover? how gradually the traffic is expected to recover?
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2 Answers
Every domain migration is unique due to unique signals and profiles of each domain, but it's a relatively trivial process as far as the engines are concerned. I've seen pixel perfect migrations on sites with millions of URL's go seemlessly and I've seen 5 page sites disappear for six months. But, on average, you can expect a 5-25% drop early and most of it back withing 90 days.
Make sure your 301's are correct, definitely concentrate the 301's on your pages with inbound links, submit .xml sitemaps on both ends, html sitemaps even help, and do a change of address in Webmaster tools. The rest is up to how much crawl budget the engines are allocating to you and the freshness they think you deserve.
I agree you can expect at 5-25% drop in traffic once you add in the 301s, the longer term issue is that if you were only ranking because of the content and that is now gone you will gradually start to lose rankings.
Google Webmaster Tools has a change of address function you can use.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/change-address?hl=en&siteUrl=http://w...
Along with help guides on site migration
https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83105&hl=en
If you are migrating everything to the strongest domain with the most content and backlinks you should be ok, but expect that over time the value of those 301s will also start to degrade.
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