Harbourline Strata · Strata management company · Sydney
How a Sydney strata manager merged five acquired brands without losing its rankings
138%of pre-migration traffic
Home & Real Estate · Asia-Pacific. A 9-month Signal engagement: five brands, five fleets of URLs, steered into a single berth without a single page lost overboard.
Five fleets, one berth. Every boat carries a URL: 11,400 of them were mapped one-to-one onto the new site, so the equity of each old page lands at its exact counterpart. Pick a route to inspect it.
01The challenge
Five timetables, one harbour, no room for a wreck.
Five acquired companies ran five ageing websites, and a careless consolidation could have wiped out years of rankings.
Each brand had its own domain, CMS and decade of backlinks from owners corporations, councils and real-estate agents. Owners still searched for the old names. Run carelessly, a merge drops thousands of URLs into 404s and the equity sinks with them; run slowly, five weak sites keep competing for the same suburbs.
The brief: one brand and one site in Sydney, with search visibility kept intact through the cutover — and then grown.
Departures · before the merge
| Route | Brand | URLs | LCP | Since |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| F1 | Northcove StrataLower North Shore | 4,100 | 5.4 s | 2004 |
| F2 | Westgate Body CorporateInner West | 3,500 | 4.9 s | 1998 |
| F3 | Parra River StrataParramatta | 3,100 | 4.6 s | 2009 |
| F4 | Eastbay Owners ServicesEastern Suburbs | 2,600 | 4.2 s | 2001 |
| F5 | Southhead Strata Co.Sutherland Shire | 1,600 | 3.9 s | 2012 |
02Diagnosis
The harbour survey.
Before a single redirect was written, every route was charted: crawls, server logs, Search Console exports and backlink targets for all five domains.
- TechnicalNotice 01
Five sitemaps, two blocked
14,900 indexable URLs across five domains; two robots files disallowed whole service folders after old rebrands.
- TechnicalNotice 02
Redirect chains up to four hops
Earlier renames had stacked 301s on 301s. Each extra hop leaks crawl budget and delays consolidation.
- TechnicalNotice 03
4.8 s median mobile LCP
Three ageing CMS installs, uncompressed hero photos and render-blocking plugins on every template.
- LocalNotice 04
Five Business Profiles, five stories
Different names, phone numbers and categories for offices that now belong to one company.
- ContentNotice 05
38 suburb pages competing
The same suburbs targeted by several brands, cannibalising one another for the same queries.
- ContentNotice 06
Three contradictory levy guides
Old guides gave different figures for the same levy rules. 61% of referring links pointed at pages slated for deletion.
03The strategy
Four lines, one network.
Built on our Signal plan (technical seo): the migration was treated as an engineering project first and a marketing launch second.
- L1
Site migration
One domain, one CMS, one set of templates. Old domains stay registered and keep answering, so nothing the five brands earned is ever left at a dead end.
- L2
Redirect mapping
Every URL with traffic, links or rankings was matched to its closest equivalent by content, not by pattern. One hop, permanent 301s; retired thin pages return 410.
- L3
Core Web Vitals
A performance budget set before design: system fonts, responsive images, no third-party sliders. Field LCP fell from a 4.8 s fleet median to 1.9 s.
- L4
Internal linking
Building, suburb and guide pages now link in a deliberate network: area hubs at the centre, every building page one click from its hub and the levy guide.
04The crossing
9 stops, month by month.
Month 1
Survey
Crawl all five domains: 14,900 URLs, server logs and backlink targets inventoried.
Month 2
Chart
Map 11,400 URLs one-to-one onto the new structure; 3,500 thin duplicates marked for retirement.
Month 3
Fit-out
Build the single site on staging: lean templates, image pipeline, Core Web Vitals budget.
Month 4
Cutover
Launch day: redirects live on all five domains, logs watched hourly, sitemaps resubmitted.
Month 5
Sweep
404 and chain sweep from logs; every internal link rewritten to the final URL.
Month 6
Hubs
Thirty-eight suburb pages merged into twelve area hubs, linked from every building page.
Month 7
Merge
Three conflicting levy guides merged into one canonical guide and calculator.
Month 8
Tune
Second Core Web Vitals pass: field LCP down to 1.9 s, INP under 150 ms.
Month 9
Berth
Old domains retained, redirects kept permanently; reporting handed over.
05Arrivals
Every route berthed. Then the harbour got busier.
Sites consolidated
5 → 1
Redirects mapped
11,400
Organic sessions vs. baseline
100% → 138%
Management enquiries / month
30 → 57
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
Organic sessions vs. baseline · enquiries
Month 9 · 138% of baseline · 57 enquiries
Berth. Old domains retained, redirects kept permanently; reporting handed over.
Rankings · best of five → one
| Query | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| strata management sydney2,900 / mo | #14 | #4 |
| strata manager inner west590 / mo | #9 | #2 |
| body corporate management north shore480 / mo | #11 | #3 |
| change strata manager nsw720 / mo | #17 | #3 |
| strata levy calculator1,300 / mo | #22 | #5 |
| strata management parramatta390 / mo | #8 | #2 |
| emergency strata repairs sydney210 / mo | #26 | #7 |
Next departure
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