Preserving Link Value

[waynekolenchuk]

My client has an existing domain, domain A. They recently purchased and absorbed another company with their own domain, domain B.

For marketing purposes company B will be rebranded as company A. They want to redirect domain B to domain A.

The problem is that company B has by far the more visible domain, with 4x the number of inbound links.

If I redirect domain B to domain A, what will happen to these links? I'm thinking their value will be lost.

[Theo-NL]

Assuming these companies are closely related in market you might just get away with 301 redirects.

Is it perhaps possible to port the actual content on domain B to domain A (for example blogs, news items, events etc.), pretty much anything that has heavy backlinks? You might want to give the 'top pages on domain' tool by SEOmoz a go to see which pages are most important to conserve link value for.

[vforvinnie]

If you do permanent redirects to the new site all the link juice shouldn't be lost, just a fraction.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/301-redirect-test-how-much-link-juice-are-you-losing/2010/04/09/

SEOmoz says around 90-99 percent of the juice will be passed.

Another idea is to contact some of the websites that site B got their links from.  You could introduce yourself and say that site A now owns site B, and you could politely ask them to change the links, or post an update in the blog post/content page that links to site B.  This could also help you get some new links for site A by establishing a relationship with these outlets that you know give quality links to good sites.

Good luck with the transition.

Vinnie

[rickdronkers]

That sucks...

A year ago I would have said to create a portal of domain B with shallow content that links to domain A. I was in the same situation.

The problem is that nobody is going to feed domain B if the company becomes non-existent. The page will drop eventually. Besides that, google doesn't seem to like shallow portal websites ;).

Right now I would:

• Create a 'our company is now ....' email template
• Fire up OpenSiteExplorer and find backlinks for Domain B
• Aks all these nice people to change their link to the relevant Domain A page

dirty work...