Leverage power of high ranking domain for a company we acquired

[RyanD.]

Recently our company acquired one of our competitors (this was a business move, not SEO related). However, their website ranks in the top-10 for many of the keywords we target. Our website generally ranks higher in these SERPs, but I would still like to leverage the power of their domain to boost our main website up even further if I can. Their website is still up and running during the customer transition period but eventually (later this year) we plan to remove it and point all customers to our main website.

Any suggestions on the best way to use their website going forward?

[JaneCopland]

Third vote for using the site and not redirecting it here (pending a re-brand of sorts to suit the fact that it's now owned by your company).

You have the opportunity to take up a lot more real estate in the SERPs than you do now, whereas redirection at worst removes the old site from the results. At best, you might see a small improvement in your rankings, but you're already ranking better than that site to begin with. As EGOL says, PageRank is logarithmic so if you're dealing with what is a weaker website (whether in actual PR or toolbar PR - the latter of which is a fairly outdated metric but still gets used for basic comparison purposes), it may actually be many times weaker than your stronger domain.

At best, using both site might allow you to target different sections of the same audience, appeal to different needs from the audience base (very large clients versus smaller businesses, etc.), and for results where you rank top 10 with both sites, you're about 20% of the results, not 10%

[EGOL]

I agree with DJ123 that you should reconsider getting rid of the site.

I would take over this new site, study its traffic for a while and learn its true value.

Then, after you know the site, see if you can do anything to supercharge it.  It is possible that reoptimization could improve its rankings significantly.  These two sites might earn a lot more money separately than redirecting the acquired site to the new site.  Two sites on the first page of Google keeps one of your competitors on the second page.

Keep in mind that a PR6 site could be 100 times more powerful than a PR4 site.  So if you redirect a low PR4 to a low PR6 your gain might be as little as 1%.  Don't count on kickass results.

This is a time to study the opportunities.  As DJ says, you can rebrand and conduct business from the site.  Also he suggests not to use one site as a link platform for the other.  You can add a couple attribution links to reveal that you own both sites but don't go crazy.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Match up relevant pages on their site to pages on your site and create 301 redirects from old to new.

Edit: DJ's suggestion also works. Downside is that there is a lot more maintenance involved in running two websites.

[DJ123]

Why not just keep their site up and rebrand everything with your company.  You do own it, so don't just burn the site.  You may be able to craft different content/topics which would be better suited for each site and thus capture a larger portion of your target audience.

It takes so much time to build up a site, it would be a shame to just switch it.

I would advise against using the sites for links to or from one another, that will hurt you in the long run.