22 replies to this topic

[belservice]

We have bought a competitor of us wich have verry good search engine rankings. Now we wonder what the best thing is to do? Make a redirect to our website? and what's the best way to redirect? I read a lot about it in forums but what is really the best way to redirect? Google indexed more than 400 pages from the website. Do we have to make 400 redirects?

Is it better to keep all info and put our links and banners everywhere on the website? This is what we did now.

Hope to get some advise on what to do.

Thanks and regards.

[Michael Martinez]

Well, if it were me, I wouldn't throw away that kind of valuable real estate. I would find a way to use it.

[Jill]

If you redirect, you will shortly lose all the rankings, so I don't think that's your best bet.

You may wish to redirect YOUR site to the one you bought though.

[incrediblehelp]

You should check the log files of this new domain and try to establish what "old" pages are doing well (if any) in the search engine as far as traffic is concerned. Then build pages for those missing files to try to maintain the rankings and traffic. If you do not wish to maintain any pages or even build new ones on this newly purchased domain then 301 redirects is the way to go with a 404 error handler for any other pages that may have rankings that you don't know about.

[oneofthe3lions]

Why not just keep it as it is and change all the contact details? Giving you two sites as a safety net incase of problems with the other one.

[AlDugan]

How does your current site do in the search engines?

[belservice]

Our website is doing verry well in search engines. Almost the same as the competitor we bought. Diffrence is that the other website is listed in DMOZ. We are not.

I want to keep the website and add links to our website or a message that we are the new owners. To keep the website up to date will not be possible. Too much work.

[incrediblehelp]

I want to keep the website and add links to our website or a message that we are the new owners. To keep the website up to date will not be possible. Too much work.

Well it looks like you cant have the best of both worlds then. Add a message about the recent domain purchase, company acquisition, whatever...on the domain that was bought. Not sure if the new website will maintain positions at all considering no website updates or SEO efforts will be taken to maintain the current rankings that the domains has. Main thing is to make sure you don't go down the duplicate content road.

Like mentioned above if you don't care about the rankings so much, you can just do 301 redirects to you main domain from the newly purchased one, but that is not what I would personally do.

[AlDugan]

In that case I would keep both up, forget the redirect idea and add a few links to your site from the new site (don't go overboard though, just do whatever makes sense for the users.)

It's tuff to say what your best option would be without having seen both sites though.

If your competitors (now yours) site got a lot of traffic in its own right you may be better off just redirecting all that traffic to your site (using a 301 redirect.) It depends on how similar the site is to yours really. If it has a good amount of unique content and it makes sense to keep it seperate from your site then just keep it up and get the benefit of some quality inbound links to your site.

Are you selling products on these sites? Or is it information related? Will the new (previous comeptitor) site remain functional (people can still buy things on that site?)

[DanThies]

In that case I would keep both up, forget the redirect idea and add a few links to your site from the new site (don't go overboard though, just do whatever makes sense for the users.)

It's tuff to say what your best option would be without having seen both sites though. 

It is tough to advise without seeing the sites, but trying to keep both sites in the SERPs is definitely not a long term strategy. The search engines don't want the same company showing up over and over in the same search results. Cross-linking them is just playing with fire.

My recommendation would be to pick a domain, and start putting up redirects from the other one.

belservice, I assume you acquired this other company because they have a viable business with customers, and not just because they had some search engine rankings. Right?

[Jill]

Diffrence is that the other website is listed in DMOZ. We are not.

And that matters because...?

[Tom Philo]

Two sites and one company. Why not target one site for large customers, and the other for all the rest?

You can keep your copy separate, rates etc, just cross link to the other site in some manner to let people know that the company does both large and small projects and the sites are customized to meet the audience needs - just like what you will do for their sites.

[belservice]

Ok, the website we bought is www.jbgsm.nl
It's a mobile phone site that only gives information to visitors. Our website: www.belservice.com and www.belservice.nl sells mobile phones. People that visits www.jbgsm.nl are looking for information about mobile phones. The're good visitors for our website.

www.belservice.com is our webshop and www.belservice.nl is only an doorway page for www.belservice.nl. (this works verry good for us and we don't have double content.)

We bought that website because of the amount of visitors it get's and because it is listed in DMOZ. We try more than a few years to be listed in DMOZ but nothing happens. The website has more than 500 unique visitors daily. All visitors come to the website because they're looking for mobile phone related info. I put banners and tekst links on the website and we get more than 50 uniue visitors daily from that website.

Redirecting the website will bring all 500 visirors to our site and will double our visitors. Keeping the website like it is will bring 50 visitors daily.

But if we redirect and after a few months we get 0 visitors than it's not worth it.

I thought to copy all pages to our website www.belservice.nl and put them in a folder for the website www.jbgsm.nl and then redirect the site to our domain www.belservice.nl/xxxxx??

[artax]

If you redirect, you will shortly lose all the rankings, so I don't think that's your best bet.

What makes you say that ? A proper redirect (301) should preserve rankings.

[glengara]

IMO a ranking informational site is too valuable to lose, I'd strongly suggest you reconsider its future.

Edited by glengara, 20 September 2005 - 06:44 AM.