Redirect gateway domain to main domain?

[ese]

We have following scenario:

Our main website - www.esedirect.co.uk which gets a 1800 visits a day with around half of those from organic search. It's been around since 2004.

Our original website - www.ese.co.uk which gets around 30 visits a day and really is nothing more than a doorway page with links to the above site and couple of other sites that belong to the same company. This is an old domain that's had content since 1997 and has good domain authority with some good links.

We are considering doing a 301 redirect from www.ese.co.co.uk to www.esedirect.co.uk to redirect the link juice.

I welcome opinions to any possible negative effects this could give and how beneficial doing this will be.

Thanks,

Lee

[Nobody1560986989723]

Hi Lee,

Just a quick reply on that score is just to make sure you double check your on-page optimisation for ese and then ensure all your off-page work, including link building reinforces that brand.

You may also find that the 301 redirect may help boost esedirect for 'ese' anyway. I have a client who is still ranking well for an old brand since his 301 was put in place, even though the old brand isn't mentioned on the new site. Your sites should be in an even stronger position given the consistency of brand name.

All the best with it!

Martin

[ese]

Hi Martin,

Thanks for your advice. It is likely we will go ahead with the redirect.

The ese.co.uk domain has ended up being a gateway page for our company which has three  divisions each with their own website. However our main division ESE Direct is the only one that's doing well online. For this reason and in conjunction with a re-branding exercise the ESE Direct website is becoming our main site and our main brand. To some people the company is known as just ESE and the ese.co.uk domain ranks well for 'ese' and this is about the only traffic this domain gets. My main concern is that by redirecting ese.co.uk to esedirect.co.uk we many loose the traffic we currently get for customers searching 'ese'.

Thanks,
Lee

[Nobody1560986989723]

I'm not sure what others think, but I think you're actually going to be better off doing the redirect. If there's one thing a site shouldn't be is a doorway page to another site.

So, what I suggest is to do the 301 redirect to capture any people who visit it and bring them into your 'real site'.

Before you do this do a download of all your existing links into ese.co.uk and then methodically go through them and ensure they point directly to esedirect.co.uk.

That way you get the link juice in the short term, but after the 301 'value' has diminished, the updated links will have the full value for esedirect.co.uk.

If there is any content of value on the old site, maybe bring it up to date and relaunch it on the new site after the 301 redirect as well.

Hope this helps!

Martin