Case: The Merger of «Новини здорової людини» with The Ukrainians

The Ukrainians (theukrainians.org) — a media organization covering culture, identity, and social change in Ukraine. The publication decided to merge the separate “Новини здорової людини” subdomain with its main website — and turned to us to ensure the transition not only avoided losses but also became a growth opportunity.

Goals

Move the content from the subdomain to the main website in a way that not only preserves the accumulated traffic but also improves rankings — turning the merger into an opportunity for growth rather than a risk.

What We Did

We analyzed the «Новини здорової людини» subdomain — identifying which pages actually generated traffic and which had been sitting there for years as dead weight without providing any value.

We prepared a technical migration brief based on three factors at once: preserving existing traffic, identifying growth potential for specific pages, and removing anything that could only hinder the newly merged website — outdated, irrelevant, or duplicate content.

After the migration, we performed another full crawl of the website, taking the new pages into account, identified technical issues that needed to be fixed, and provided a separate technical brief. We verified all changes directly in Google Search Console.

Result

Already in the first month after the migration:

  • Traffic to the news pages increased by +39% compared with the previous month — the highest figure across the entire available period
  • The number of unique visitors to the news pages increased by +48% in one month
  • Performance over the previous 9 months before the migration was unstable and fluctuated without a clear trend — after the merger, the website reached a new, noticeably higher level

Merging websites is one of the riskiest technical transitions in SEO: the wrong approach can easily turn a merger into the loss of years of accumulated traffic. When a migration is based on data rather than assumptions, however, it can become a catalyst for growth rather than a setback.