Five separate sites consolidated into one, with the search equity carried across intact.

The situation.

A global CNC manufacturer serving the aerospace and defense sector had accumulated five separate websites over the years. The way most companies do: a division here, an acquisition there, a product line that once warranted its own microsite. Five brands, five codebases, five domains, and the search authority of the whole organization split five ways. Each site competed with the others for the same relevance, the brand read as fragmented to anyone who encountered more than one of them, and every update meant touching five things instead of one.

In a sector like aerospace and defense, where the buyers are technical, the procurement cycles are long, and credibility is assessed carefully, a scattered and inconsistent web presence is a genuine liability. The goal was consolidation into a single, coherent platform under one domain, presenting the organization as the unified operation it actually was.

Why consolidation is the dangerous part.

Merging sites is where search rankings most often die, and it is worth being precise about why. Every page on every old domain has accumulated authority that is tied to its specific URL. Move that page, or retire its domain, without a precise redirect in place, and the authority attached to it simply evaporates. Multiply that across five sites and hundreds of URLs, and a careless migration can erase years of ranking over a single weekend. The entire engagement, in effect, lived or died on the redirects.

The inventory.

Before a single redirect could be written, I needed to know every URL that existed. Not the ones anyone remembered, but all of them. I pulled the full inventory from each site’s XML sitemaps, from Google Search Console’s record of what it had indexed, and from a complete crawl of each property, then reconciled those sources against one another so nothing fell through the gaps. Old campaign landing pages, deep product specifications, legacy documents, the pages that no longer appeared in any menu but still ranked and still earned traffic. Those forgotten pages are usually the ones a migration quietly drops, and they are often the ones carrying hard-won authority.

What I did.

I moved all of the domains onto Cloudflare, which put the entire redirect layer under a single control plane instead of scattered across five different hosting setups. Then the methodical part: mapping every URL from every old site to its correct destination on the consolidated platform, one by one, and implementing each as a permanent 301 redirect through Cloudflare’s redirect tools. Roughly four hundred redirects in all. Serving them at the edge meant they resolved instantly and reliably, before a request ever reached an origin server, and it kept every rule in one auditable place rather than buried in five separate configurations.

The redirects were built and tested before the cutover, not after. Every legacy address was confirmed to resolve to the right home on the new site, so that from the moment the consolidated platform went live, there were no dead ends for either visitors or search engines to hit.

The cutover.

With the map complete and the 301s staged, the launch itself was deliberately undramatic, which is the point. The new platform went live with the full redirect layer already active. I submitted the new structure to Search Console, watched coverage and crawl behavior closely over the following weeks, and resolved the handful of edge cases that only ever surface under real traffic. A clean migration should look like a non-event from the outside, and this one did.

What consolidation actually buys.

The redirects protected what already existed, but the point of the project was what consolidation unlocked going forward. One platform instead of five means one place to publish, one design system to maintain, one analytics view of the whole business instead of five partial ones, and one security and update posture to keep current rather than five aging ones drifting apart. For a lean team, the maintenance savings alone are substantial. And the brand finally reads as a single, credible operation rather than a confusing constellation of half-related sites. Future changes that once meant five rounds of work now mean one.

The outcome.

Five sites became one. The fragmented presence resolved into a single platform under a single domain, far simpler to maintain and far clearer to both users and search engines. Because the redirect map was complete and the 301s were in place at launch rather than bolted on afterward, the accumulated search equity of all five sites carried across to the consolidated site instead of being stranded on retired domains. The company shed the maintenance burden of five codebases and the brand confusion of five identities, and it did so without paying for the consolidation in lost rankings, which is the bill that comes due when this work is done carelessly. The hard part was never the new site. It was making sure two decades of accumulated authority arrived there intact.