Handling redirects when 2 companies merge
-
I am working with 2 local businesses that are joining forces to create 1, new business.
Both individually hold consistent position 1 and 2 in Google for the majority of their chosen terms.
However, the merger will see a new brand name and therefore a fresh out of the box domain.
I have suggested setting up a partition on the hosting for both old URLS. All that will be hosted there would be .htaccess files with 301s to the like-for-like pages on the brand new domain / website. This will obviously also aid UX.
However, is this overkill? I personally think not... but would a domain level 301 redirect work just as well from preserving / passing on any authority to the new URL.
-
I'm chiming in to add a vote for Mike's strategy. I've used the same strategy with great success when rebranding a business and moving it from one site to another.
-
Based on my limited experience of this type of situation, I've felt a good start is to Canonical each page on the old domain to its counterpart on the new domain and place a call to action on the old sites letting people know of the move and/or branding change. Submit for crawl request, let the bots begin filtering through the changes without affecting user experience yet. Then after some time, so your regulars have become acclimated to the upcoming changes and so have the bots, you can 301 those pages from the old site to the relevant counterpart they were already canonicalized to.
-
However, is this overkill? I personally think not... but would a domain level 301 redirect work just as well from preserving / passing on any authority to the new URL.
Not overkill in my opinion.
We have acquired several businesses, but never merged them into a new domain, so my process was to utilize the acquired domains as long as they held value. With the last competitor we acquired, I actually built out his site and it has shown immense value.
I know this is slightly off your situation topic, but it may help.
KJr
-
I wouldn't say this is overkill and setting up the like-for-like redirects from both domains is the ideal approach. Your approach makes the most sense for maintaining rank and as much authority as possible.
That being said I have never had to migrate two domains to one brand new domain. We have handle straight one to one domain migrations with decent success, although we did see a slight dip initially. Please let the community know how the migration goes and any lessons you learn along the way.
Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is using meta refresh as a redirect method bad for our SEO?
Our CMS creates Call-To-Action buttons that use a meta refresh to redirect and MOZ stops it's crawl. The MOZ crawler hits these redirects and is unable to pass to the desired URL and so reports issues. So could this be happening to other crawlers or will most indexing be unaffected by this method? Essentially, is using meta refresh as a redirect method bad for our SEO?
Local SEO | | BLUEvennMOZ0 -
We're merging 2 separate websites into 1 but need to ideally rank service pages for both locations
I have a dilemma, we're merging 2 websites, one an Australian branch and one a UK one. We've decided to have a UK page and a AUS page so agency.site/uk/ agency.site/aus/ but what is the best tactic for the service pages? ideally, we'd like a web-design service page to rank in Australia and the UK but not sure if this is actually possible, or whether to duplicate the pages and localise them i.e. /web-design-leeds/ and /web-design-melbourne/ What's everyone's thoughts on this? localised landing pages with some duplicate content or one master page with both locations mentioned? Thanks!
Local SEO | | Unbranded_Lee1 -
301 redirect from OLDEST site to OLD site to a NEW site. Cons, pros, how?
Local business had a site on domain name - (A) for a 5 years. Few years ago they moved to a new domain - (B) and did 301 redirect from A to B. Now they want to move to another domain containing a keyword - (C+kw).com and apply 301 Question:
Local SEO | | Ryan_V
How to proceed with the redirect for a C+kw not to loose ranking? Which option is better?
1. Redirect from the oldest domain (A) to a newest (C)
A>301>C 2. Redirect from existing domain (B) to a newest (C)
A>301>B
B>301>C 3. Stop existing redirect from A to B, instead do two redirects to a new domain (C)
A stop 301 to B
A>301>C
B>301>C As far as I know under the same conditions a new domain will rank worse than an aged domain. On the other part keyword in domain name helps with local SEO. I think that for the long run it's ok to loose some traffic for a few months but have a better chances to rank in future. What do you think guys?0 -
To Keep My Company's CO.UK Page Or Redirect It...
Hi Moz'ers - I have a question... Just to set the stage, we're a small recruiting firm, with an even smaller marketing department. I'm essentially a one man wrecking crew and don't have a ton of extra time. That being said, I know that page rank (and local office rank) are critical to our inbound lead generation, so I'm willing to invest some of my time into doing it right. The issue I'm having is ranking high as a local business in Austin, New York, San Francisco, and London, UK (to name a few). So far I've solved this through building dedicated subpages on our .com site and link building key word anchor text towards those pages. The only page that's not really gaining traction is our London page. So I decided to clone (most of) the site, tweak the text (to try and avoid dup text), and try and get that page to rank. I'm also having it hosted on a local server, have it using a local domain address suffix (co.uk), using local hreflang (on our .com site), created dedicated web 2.0 sites, and done my best to do some link building. The problem I'm facing is crapy local ranking, and limited bandwidth to maintain two sites. Should I: A) Scrap the co.uk site and focus on the .com (and subpages)
Local SEO | | bettsrecruiting
B) Keep the co.uk domain, and just redirect the URL to our .com page
C) Keep the co.uk domain, send all links from the home page to the relevant page on our .com page, and set up 301 redirects for all other relevant pages.
D) Hire someone to clean up, rewrite, and upkeep the co.uk site because it has the most SEO value in the long run and is the only way I'm going to be able to rank locally in London. What are your thoughts? Thanks in advance! Tim Our European Site - http://bettsrecruiting.co.uk/
Our US Site - http://bettsrecruiting.com/0 -
Inherited a site by well known company - Input and opinions please!
Hi all, Just handed the keys to this site "newly" designed and put together by a large well known company during a small business experiment they were running. They took a dated old non-responsive site with questionable architecture and even more questionable SEO practices and made it responsive and well... what you see now. I skimmed it and started to review and audit but decided I was a little too close to be neutral so thought some third party opinions would be helpful as a start. I guess I'm just hoping for some fresh eyes to take a look and give me your overall impression re: structure, coding, SEO etc and then some idea of how you might tackle all of what I was handed if it were a perfect world scenario where there was actually a good, strong budget and a lot of time to spend. WWYD in other words! 😉 Thanks so much for any comments in advance! www.certifiedroofing.info
Local SEO | | Pixelwik0 -
Changing Your Company's Name
Our firm is considering adding another person and adding that person's name to the firm. In terms of our online presence, what all would have to be done for that to work? For example: 1. We aren't changing the domain, but should we get a domain with the new name and redirect it to our current site? 2. Do I need ask the people who have linked to our site with our name in the anchor text to change it to the new name? 3. Do I need to get back to all our old posts/blogs/etc and edit them with the new name? 4. Can we use our current social media names or do we need to setup new accounts? 5. If we decide to just keep the onsite marketing the same, but change the name in regards to offsite markeitng (banners, billboards, etc) will that conflict have a very negative effect? 6. Anything else, anyone wants to point out would be great. Thanks, Ruben
Local SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Local Pages for National (Service) Companies
Hi there, I was wanting to know the value of local pages for a service company that operates nationally. They do not have a phone number or address, but they do maintain employees in each of the locations and are thus, keen to emphasize this fact with location pages. The location pages merely explain that they have staff in each of the locations and experience working there, alongside a variety of information that is relevant to the industry/market in that location. None of the location pages are currently ranking well at all - in fact, all of the ones I've looked at so far have had a page authority of 1. Most of the major towns, cities and counties for the entire UK have been covered which means the location pages constitute a significant proportion of all of the pages for the entire site. My questions are: Is a national service company likely to benefit from having location pages? And could it even be something they could be penalised for at some point down the line? Thanks very much, in advance, for your time. Kind Regards, Tom
Local SEO | | National-Homebuyers0 -
Francise Space: How to handle Duplicate Content?
We have a client - http://www.certapro.com/ with 330+ individual franchises. The individual franchisees all share the same content. If you perform a series of search by zipcode, you'll see the different regions all share the same copy blocks. How would you handle this situation? New content for all 330+? Canonicalize them to a single source? Keep in mind we need to scale and would have to work with the local partners who may not be web savvy. Also thinking about iframing the same content as an alternative.
Local SEO | | Aviatech0