Domain forward or 301 redirect

[topsailislander]

My company recently acquired another company including their web presence.

We are soon ending their website and will be either 301 redirecting their domain to our domain or pointing their domain to our nameservers.

Their domain authority is only 25 while our domain authority is 32. Their domain was created in 1998 while ours was created in 1999.

So to keep our domain authority up or enhance it, should we do a 301 redirect or a domain forward.

And that is if there is any difference?

Thanks

Chris

[topsailislander]

Thanks everyone, I went with the 301 redirect.

Thanks again!

Chris

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Chris,

I agree with Moosa,

Use a 301 redirect and if you have valuable content you can check that using Moz or Google Webmaster tools look for top pages or your analytics.

check out the method described here where you use page to page not domain to domain

http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

You'll want to 301 redirect instead of point them out your name servers because if you do that you are not really going to help your site out at all. This is a great article regarding merging to websites

http://moz.com/blog/2-become-1-merging-two-domains-made-us-an-seo-killing

here is some more helpful data

http://blog.woorank.com/2013/05/the-flow-of-link-juice/

http://www.seoblog.com/2014/06/link-juice-lost-301-redirect/

hope this helps,

Thomas

[DennisSeymour]

It's basically the same thing, just with a different process.

But just to answer, for SEO = 301's are always better.

[MoosaHemani]

Hello Chris,

Honestly speaking, I see this a little differently. In my opinion numbers and technical problems are less important than how your users are going to feel when you will have two websites or if you redirect other website to your domain name.

If the merger news is there in people, then it make a perfect sense to 301 redirect the bought company to yours and if not then you probably should spread this news through press release, social media and blog platforms and then make this 301 shift so that it make sense to the people within your industry.

Technically this 301 shift should increase your domain authority (if there is no panda or penguin attack on the website that you are trying to redirect).

Hope this helps!