Merger & Acquisition Best Practices
-
Our company (DA 40) recently acquired another company (DA 20). The domain for the acquired company is up, and I am being asked if we should keep paying for the domain. I have a couple of questions regarding this.
- Is it best practice to continue paying for the older domain and do 301 redirects to our website? If yes, do I have to add 301 redirects for individual matching pages? For example, if the old site has the topic XYZ, should a 301 go to our site if we have a similar page topic XYZ? What about contact pages, about us, etc?
- Do we redirect all non-matching topics to the new home page? Or in the case of their blogs, do we redirect their blogs to the new blog home page even though we are not keeping their old blogs?
- What if our company keeps acquiring other companies, are we to assume we have to keep paying for the domains of the acquired companies?
- Is there anyone out there that would say stop paying for the old domain and just review the company's inbound links, reach out to those sites, and make sure they link to the new site instead?
Thanks for the help in advance.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved How much time does it take for Google to read the Sitemap?
Hi there, I could use your help with something. Last week, I submitted my sitemap in the search console to improve my website's visibility on Google. Unfortunately, I got an error message saying that Google is not reading my sitemap. I'm not sure what went wrong. Could you take a look at my site (OceanXD.org) and let me know if there's anything I can do to fix the issue? I would appreciate your help. Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OceanXD1 -
Reusing an already 301 redirected URL for a very important keyword
I have a question about reusing an already 301 redirected URL Till now I never reused an URLs that has been already redirected with a 301 redirect. However, I just started working on a website where in past they created a lot of 301 redirects without thinking about the future, and now certain URLs, that are currently redirected with a 301, would be very useful (exact match) and needed (for some of the most important keywords for this specific business), to maintain an optimal, homogeneous and "beautiful" URL structure. Has any of you ever reused a URL that was previously redirected with a 301 redirect? If yes what are your experiences with it? Can content on the reused URL (that was previously 301 redirected and than the redirect removed) normally rank if the page is reestablished and the redirect is removed (and you do great content, on page, internal linking, backlinking, .... ) or is such an URL risky / not recommended / "burned" forever and not recommended to be reused again... especially for very important keywords since it present the exact match ?! Thank you very much for all your help! Regards
Technical SEO | | moz46y0 -
What are the SEO ramifications of domain redirection?
Hi Moz Community! I was just trying to set up our global site and got this message: "Redirect detected
SEO Tactics | | Padmagandhini
We have detected that the domain bhaktimarga.org redirects to prodfront-coli.bhaktimarga.mediactive-network.net. We do not recommend tracking a redirect URL. Would you like to track prodfront-coli.bhaktimarga.mediactive-network.net for this campaign instead?"
6358703c-d8ef-4c0a-83a9-c948d370d743-image.png What's interesting is when you go to the site, Bhaktimarga.org, it shows our domain in the URL bar. Is this done for performance and masks the hosting provider domain? I haven't talked to website developers about this yet, but my main question is...Does this have any SEO ramification? Thanks so much,
Padma0 -
Domain migration goes wrong. I have a few quesitons.
So I did a domain migration 4-5 months ago, lost about 70-80% of the traffic and I still couldn't recover the traffic. Redirected everything 1:1 Updated internal links Triggered change of address in GSC Monitoring the server logs (everything is perfect) Uploaded the old sitemap with the old URLs What happened/ what have I noticed so far: Almost all URLs have been indexed on the new domain New content on the new domain is indexed in a matter of few hours There's only one particular page that still appears as "Crawled and indexed" on the old domain and still receives traffic. I tried to request the manual indexing so Google could figure out the page has been redirected but nothing has changed. I think this is a sign Google hasn't finished the domain migration process? Most WEBP images appear as "Crawled - currently not indexed" on the old domain. Shouldn't they appear as "Page with redirect"? The new domain is ranking pretty well on a bunch of keywords (they're like 2-3% of the total page count) while the rest of 97% of pages haven't appeared not even in the top 200 results (these pages don't receive a single impression) Google acts a bit strangely on crawling the old domain. He keeps crawling the category pages over and over again (sometimes I see 20-30 crawls on a single category page in a single day) while the inner pages and images are rarely crawled. Like I see 4-5 crawls on images per day maximum. The traffic and number of rankings keywords haven't changed a bit after the last Google updates. Does this indicate that we haven't been impacted by them? So any suggestions on what else can I do to find out the reason why the website hasn't recovered? My guesses are: The process is still not finished (unlikely since it already passed 4-5 months) There's a technical error that I can't find (again, unlikely since I see nothing strange in the logs that'd indicate Google has problems fetching the site) Someone did something nasty (like blasting the website with backlinks or copying the content) that hindered the process? I see a couple of sites made in a language I can't read that literally copy and translate the content from my website and publish on theirs with the canonical URL my website URL. Also, two sites cloned mine after the migration but I managed to eliminate them in time. I had a lot of spammy backlinks on the old domain that have been automatically generated on the ranking pages over a few years. I haven't disavowed them because Google claimed they can identify and eliminate them. Now all those backlinks have instantly moved to the new domain which could put Google in panic mode and lower its trust in our website. Should I disavow them? Please any help is highly appreciated.
SEO Tactics | | Anna332120 -
Subdirectory site / 301 Redirects / Google Search Console
Hi There, I'm a web developer working on an existing WordPress site (Site #1) that has 900 blog posts accessible from this URL structure: www.site-1.com/title-of-the-post We've built a new website for their content (Site #2) and programmatically moved all blog posts to the second website. Here is the URL structure: www.site-1.com/site-2/title-of-the-post Site #1 will remain as a normal company site without a blog, and Site #2 will act as an online content membership platform. The original 900 posts have great link juice that we, of course, would like to maintain. We've already set up 301 redirects that take care of this process. (ie. the original post gets redirected to the same URL slug with '/site-2/' added. My questions: Do you have a recommendation about how to best handle this second website in Google Search Console? Do we submit this second website as an additional property in GSC? (which shares the same top-level-domain as the original) Currently, the sitemap.xml submitted to Google Search Console has all 900 blog posts with the old URLs. Is there any benefit / drawback to submitting another sitemap.xml from the new website which has all the same blog posts at the new URL. Your guidance is greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HimalayanInstitute0 -
Supplier Videos & Duplicate Content
Hi, We have some supplier videos the product management want to include on these product pages. I am wondering how detrimental this is for SEO & the best way to approach this. Do we simply embed the supplier YouTube videos, or do we upload them to our YouTube - referencing the original content & then embed our YouTube videos? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
When migrating website platforms but keeping the domain name how best do we add the new site to google webmaster tools? Best redirect practices?
We are moving from BigCommerce to Shopify but maintaining our domain name and need to make sure that all links redirect to their corresponding links. We understand the nature of 301s and are fine with that, but when it comes to adding the site to google webmaster tools, not losing link juice and the change of address tool we are kind of lost. Any advice would be most welcome. Thank you so much in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WNL0 -
Best Format for URLs on large Ecommerce Site?
I saw this article, http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/common-ecommerce-technical-seo-problems/, and noticed that Geoff mentioned that product URLs format should be in one of the following ways: Product Page: site.com/product-name Product Page: site.com/category/sub-category/product-name However, for SEO, is there a preferred way? I understand that the top one may be better to prevent duplicate page issues, but I would imagine that the bottom would be better for conversion (maybe the user backtracks to site.com/category/sub-category/ to see other products that he may be interested in). Also, I'd imagine that the top URL would not be a great way to distribute link juice since everything would be attached to the root, right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eTundra0