Preserving Link Value
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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.
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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.
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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
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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...
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