Two companies merge: website A redirect 301 to website B. Problems?
-
Hi,
last december the company I work for and another company merged. The website of company A was taken offline and the home page was 302 redirected to a page on website B. This page had information about the merger and the consequences for customers. The deeper pages of website A were 301 redirected to similar pages on website B.
After a while, the traffic from the redirected home page decreased and we thought it was time to change the redirect from a 302 into a 301 redirect to the home page. Because there are still a lot of links to the home page of website A and we wanted to preserve the link juice.
Two weeks ago we changed the 302 redirect from website A into a 301 redirect to the home page of website B. Last week the Google webmaster tools account of website B showed the links from the 301 redirected website A.
The total amount of links doubled and the top anchor text is the name of company A instead of company B.
This, off course, could trigger an alarm at Google. Because we got a lot of new links with a different anchor text. A tactic used by spammers/black-hats.
I am a bit worried that our change will be penalized by Google.
But our change is legit. It is to the advantage of our customers to find us if they search for the name of company A or click on a link to website A.
We didn´t change the change of address of domain A in Google webmaster tools yet. Is it a good idea to change the change of address of domain A into domain B?
Are there other precautions we can take?
-
Is it a good idea to change the GWT change of address of domain A into domain B?
Just make sure you don't change to a subfolder or subdomain (box.domain.com or domain.com/box)
Mike
-
Thank you very much.
The redirect has been done correctly. Nothing to worry about there.
The only thing I am worried about is the enormous amount of new links we received through the redirect. In a post penguin world, this could be a threat.
Is it a good idea to change the GWT change of address of domain A into domain B?
Or other precautions?
-
It is a good thing to ask questions when you are uncertain about something that can be as important as a corporate website.
A website has content assets, link assets, ranking assets, traffic assets, branding assets that can be lost when a site is left go. Each one of these should be evaluated before moving away from a domain. Simply doing a 302 redirect abandons almost all of them. This can be an enormous financial loss.
A 301 redirect is the best way to go if you simply want to transfer link equity and type in traffic to the new domain. My question is... Has this been done correctly?
Also, do you have server logs or analytics from the old domain? If you do you can use them to figure out which pages on the old domain were pulling traffic and for what keywords. If there is nice traffic coming into the site for them then it would be a good idea to consider getting the original content from the old site and moving it to the new site. It might not be too late to redirect the URLs on the old site directly to the new URLs on the new site that hold this content.
If I was you I would consider getting a paid consultation from someone experienced in SEO and moving domains in specific who can look deeply into the data from the old site and recommend how to best capitalize it on a new site. You could be walking away from thousands to millions of future dollars in revenue.
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
-
301 Redirects - Clearing out a 300 Page WordPress Website (HELP)
I'm working on a WordPress website that has around 300 pages (not posts, pages), many of which have very little content and / or content that is super outdated with zero relevancy. The site has been up and running for 10 years and ranks well overall, 1st in many instances for competitive keywords. The company holds yearly events and works with various other companies who exhibit at their events. In their very early years, they created pages on their website for each of these companies, some of which don't even exist anymore. If I had to delete all of the pages that are deprecated there would only be 10 pages of the site left (with blog posts counted separately). Would it be safe to remove these pages and set a 301 redirect to a semi-related page without hurting the website rankings? Any and all advice appreciated!!
Technical SEO | | enimmo19970 -
Redirecting 301 or 302?
Hi, I think the part of this question has been already discussed, but not exactly the same, I think. My site requires authentication for member page. When a user try to go to member area, we redirect to 3rd party to do the authentication. 1. user clicks a link to www.mysite.com/member/contents.html
Technical SEO | | HypermediaSystems
2. www.myauthenticate.com/login?h=somehashuniquehash454859428778545 (enters id/pass)
3. login success => redirect back to www.mysite.com/member/contents.html We are doing it 302, temporary redirect. But moz crawler error seems to suggest we should do it 301.
So my question is:
A. Should we do it 301???
B. If we do 301, what happens to myauthenticate.com? since it has hashtag, I am afraid it could create a lot of duplicate contents on myauthenticate.com side... Thank you so much for your help in advance...0 -
301 Redirect question www to root.com
I have a site that has been up for a few weeks now and is currently in a www format and i am considering changing it to just mydomain.com I also have quite a few directory listings (including google places/bing) for this site w/ the www. url. If i do this, change it in my google analytics, and update my wordpress internal page + htaccess file. Will i lose any of the link juice i had from my www pages? Would this be something that would be advised since i've registered for many sites, or is there a potential that this could end up hurting me? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | tgr0ss0 -
301 Redirect Question for trailing slash & index.php
1. Can you show me how to do a redirect for forhttp://www.exercisebiology.com to http://www.exercisebiology.com/ I want to add the trailing slash. 2. Also how to redirect from http://www.exercisebiology.com/in... to http://www.exercisebiology.com/. When I tried to redirect the index.php last time, I couldn't login to the forums. Everytime when someone tries to login to my forums, it takes them the to the home page. I did it through the hostgator CP. I am thinking someone could help me here. Thank you so much!
Technical SEO | | anoopbal0 -
How do 301 redirects affect rankings?
Scenario: example.com/red-shoes gets 301 redirected to example.com/brown-boots because we have stopped selling red shoes and now only sell brown boots (which is a fairly new page with no authority). the red-shoes page ranked well for "red shoes" and "footwear". Will Google still index and show the red-shoes url in the SERPs? Will the "red shoes" and "footwear" keywords still rank well? Or does the redirected/new boots page need to properly support these keywords? The boots page has inherited the juice from the shoes page, but how does it help the boots page rank well? Only for keywords that both pages targeted, like a general "footwear" type keyword? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | akim260 -
301 Redirect & Cloaking
HEllo~~~~ People. I have a question regarding on cloaking. I will be really greatful if you can help me with question. I have a site www.example.com and it is targeting for multi countries. So I use sub directories for targeting multi countries. e.g. www.example.com/us/ www.example.com/de/ www.example.com/hk/ ....... so on and on. Therefore, when people type www.example.com, I use IP delivery to send users to each coutries. Here is my question. I use 301 redirect for IP delivery, which means when user enter www.example.com, my site read user's IP and send them to right country site by 301 redirect. In this case, is there any possibility that Google considers it as cloaking? Please people.... share me some ideas and thoughs.
Technical SEO | | Artience0 -
Using DNS & 301 redirects to gain control over a rogue site
I'd appreciate peoples' views on the following please. We have been approached by a client whose website does not rank # 1 for their own distinctive brand name due to this position being taken by a site they had developed for them by an affiliate some years back. The affiliate's site is clearly seen by Google as the definitive site for the brand - being older, having more links & in both Yahoo & DMOZ. The relationship has soured with the affiliate & the client wants to take control of the affiliate site & have it 301 redirect to the 'real' brand site. The affiliate won't cooperate (funny that). However whilst the client doesn't have control over the affiliate's website, they do own the domain. Given this, it seems that an option is to temporarily create a 1 page website on another server, change the affiliate website domain DNS settings to point to this, & in turn have that 301 re-direct to the client's website. This is a bit of a round about approach, but necessary because the affiliate won't directly 301 the site they control - despite the client owning it. (As I say the relationship has soured). If you think there's a better alternative approach to this problem (aside from litigation), I'd appreciate hearing it please. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | SureFire0 -
301 Redirect Issue
I'm having an issue with 301 redirects: Let's see if I can verbalize my thoughts on this one... So we just recently moved our site to Wordpress. One of our new 301 commands is redirecting oursite.com/news to oursite.com/blog . However there are other links from our previous site that look like oursite.com/news/XYZ and the issue is that, because wordpress structures its links differently, that URL is not equivalent to oursite.com/blog/XYZ. Instead, it might look something more like oursite.com/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ or something. Does that make sense? The issue is that when I find an old link of ours on google that looks something like "oursite.com/news/XYZ" or "oursite.com/news/ABC" it is automatically replacing "news" with "blog". When I try to go in manually and redirect anything that says "/news/XYZ" to "/blog/yaddayadda/XYZ" it still doesn't work. It still just replaces "news" with "blog." Wow I realize that might not make sense to anyone but if it does - please advise!! Thanks!!!!
Technical SEO | | EntrustSEO0