Fold in the brand. Keep every product it ranked for.

Galls and Quartermaster, the company behind Qm Uniforms, merged in 2012. Both sold uniforms, duty gear and footwear to police, fire, EMS and security professionals. Many of the same brands were on both sites.

Running two ecommerce sites for one company meant two catalogs to keep up to date, two checkouts, and two sites competing for the same searches. The decision was to fold Qm Uniforms into galls.com.

In ecommerce, most search traffic lands on product and category pages, not the homepage. A migration that handled the homepage well and the product pages badly would lose most of what qmuniforms.com had built. Three things had to make the move:

The work started with a complete inventory of qmuniforms.com: more than 10,000 product pages, plus every category page.

Then each Qm product was matched to the same product on galls.com. The two sites named their URLs differently, but every product had a unique SKU, the item number that stays the same whichever site sells it. Matching on SKU turned more than 10,000 product URLs into an exact 1:1 map: no guessing, and no product left without a destination.

Category pages are the aisles of an online store. They rank for the broad searches (tactical pants, duty boots, flashlights) that products alone don’t win.

Each Qm category was mapped to its Galls equivalent, so the rankings Qm’s category pages had earned for those broad searches carried over to the Galls page covering the same products.

A redirect sends anyone who visits an old URL, person or search engine, to its new one. A permanent (301) redirect also passes along most of the ranking value the old page had earned.

Every Qm product redirected 1:1 to the same product on galls.com. Not to the homepage, and not to a generic category page. Someone searching for a specific pair of pants found that pair of pants, and Google saw the new page as the old page’s rightful replacement.

Category pages redirected to their aligned Galls categories, so the broad searches followed too.

A redirect points Google to the new page. What it finds there decides whether the rankings stick. If the new page describes the product differently, Google has to reconsider it from scratch.

So for every migrated product, the Galls page had to carry the same on-page signals the Qm page had earned its rankings with:

Redirects cover old links and bookmarks. They don’t cover people typing “Quartermaster uniforms” into a search bar next month.

A Quartermaster brand page on galls.com gave those searches somewhere relevant to land, and gave Qm’s own products a home on the new site. On the homepage, a banner told returning Qm customers plainly where to order now.

Before launch, the redirect map was tested against the old URL list: every old URL had to redirect once, straight to a live page, with no chains and no dead ends.

The destination pages were checked against the old ones for the six signals above, so no product arrived on galls.com missing the title, copy or schema that had earned its rankings.

At launch, the redirects went live and the old URLs were checked on the live site. From there, the job was watching crawl errors and traffic, and fixing any old URL that landed somewhere it shouldn’t, as soon as it turned up.