Moving Duplicate Sites

[waynekolenchuk]

Apologies in advance for the complexity.

My client, company A, has purchased company  B in the same industry, with A and B having separate domains. Current hosting arrangement combines registrar and hosting functions in 1 account so as to allow both domains to point to a common folder, with the result that identical content is displayed for  both A & B. The current site is kind of an amalgam of A and B.

Company A has decided to rebrand and completely absorb company B. The problem is that link value overwhelmingly favours B over A.

The current (only) hosting package is Windows, and I am creating a new site and moving them to Linux with another hosting company. I can use 301's for A , but not for B as it is a separate domain and currently shares a hosting package with A.

How can I best preserve the link juice that domain B has? The only conclusion I can come up with is to set up separate Linux hosting for B which will allow for the use of 301's.

Does anyone have a better idea?

[Hurf]

A pleasure Wayne! (If you get stuck with the web hosting issue I'm sure we can arrange a whip round for you!  ;o)

[Hurf]

Blimey! How tight are her purse strings ;o)

As you could get away with next to no space for this if you are happy to redirect using just a .htaccess file you are going to need a very small hosting package if you chose that method.

I think I would specifically request it by email and explain why it is required and the detriment of NOT having it and ask her in the email if she can approve the purchase - essentially make her say 'YES, not problem' (and get the problem sorted quickly) or 'NO, not happening' (and leave the ball in her court - when people kick off in the top offices!)

If you are tasked to do a job (and expected to do it well!) then you can't be denied the tools you need to carry out the task - without someone else putting their neck on the block (in writing!)

[waynekolenchuk]

Thanks to both of you, as this validates my logic.

[waynekolenchuk]

Nothing preventing me per se, but in spite of this being a reasonably sized company, I deal with a marketing manager who doesn't understand the importance here. My real challenge here will be to convince her that it's important enough to set up another hosting account

[Hurf]

If there anything preventing you from moving site B into an environment where you can control it and 301 ing it from there?

EDIT: Ahh, it looks like you consider that as your best option currently - based on the comments right at the end of your post?

Migrating Site B into an environment you can control as you wish makes perfect sense to me and create all the 301s  to your new Site A when migration is complete - you should be able to do this pretty seamlessly - as you don't need to worry about the bulk of the site itself - just a change of nameserver and point it to a server that contains your already mapped out 301'd .htaccess file?

[EGOL]

The problem is that link value overwhelmingly favours B over A.

Looks like you have a great opportunity to increase the rankings of A.

I have done this using the same method that you described.  We did a page-by-page 301 redirect of B to A - but all was on my own server that allowed multiple accounts - so no added cost.