Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Mergers & Acquisitions - Website Transition Good practice
-
Hi everyone,
I was wondering if anyone has come across good practice for maintaining websites after a merger or acquisition where there needs to be an association between two websites of the two companies involved.
For an acquisition, I'm considering moving the acquired company to a sub domain of the parent company e.g. aquiredcompany.parentcompany.com. On both websites there wmay be a prominant popup so visitors can switch between the websites if they have visited the incorrect one.
One worry I have is the acquired company has some good rankings, which I want to keep. I will of course manage the process through 301 redirects.
But I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this approach or can suggest any better solutions.
Thanks in advance,
Stuart
-
Hi Stuart
There could be many nuances to every situation (essentially, what type of sites they are and what type of content it is), but in general I'd go with what's most user-friendly - what will reduce any confusion, and send old traffic to the new home of the acquired company. A subdomain is fine if you want to clearly show to users a distinction between the acquiring vs acquired site.
Definitely do your 301 redirects. I would highly recommend reading up on Cyrus' article here about 301 redirects. In general, the content should be basically the same from the old page to the new page being redirected to. I would try to migrate the site "as is" as much as possible to eliminate other factors/changes that could affect things. You can update things later, but this was it makes it easier to analyze if any rankings are lost. In other words, be systematic and keep track of when/what you change.
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
-
Website rankings drop significantly after moving to new hosting provider
My website - www.isacleanse.co.nz has dropped from being top10 rankings for all of my keywords to not even being in top 50 after just checking now. It used to be hosted on: www.1stdomains.nz
Web Design | | IsaCleanse
It got migrated to Sitground servers about a month ago See attached screenshot - would moving hosting provider cause such a huge drop? Or would there be anything else I should be looking at ? J2ahi0 -
Spanish website indexed in English, redirect to spanish or english version if i do a new website design?
Hi MOZ users, i have this problem. We have a website in Spanish Language but Google crawls it on English (it is not important the reasons). We re made the entire website and now we are planning the move. The new website will have different language versions, english, spanish and portuguese. Somebody tells me that we have to redirect the old urls (crawled on english) to the new english versions, not to the spanish (the real language of the firsts). Example: URL1 Language: Spanish - Crawled on English --> redirect to Language English version. the other option will be redirect to the spanish new version, which the visitor is waiting to find. URL1 Language: Spanish - Crawled on English --> redirect to Language Spanish version. What do you think? Which is the better option?
Web Design | | NachoRetta0 -
Website Redesign - What to do with old 301 URLs?
My current site is on wordpress. We are currently designing a new wordpress site, with the same URLs. Our current approach is to go into the server, delete the current website files and ad the new website files. My current site has old urls which are 301 redirected to current urls. Here is my question. In the current redesign process, do i need to create pages for old the 301 redirected urls so that we do not lose them in the launch of the new site? or is the 301 command currently existing outside of our server so this does not matter? Thank you in advance.
Web Design | | CamiloSC0 -
SEO strategy for UK / US websites
Hi, We currently have a UK-focused site on www.palmatin.com ; We're now targeting the North American market as well, but the contents of the site need to be different from UK. One option was to create another domain for the NA market but I assume it would be easier to rank with palmatin.com though. What would you suggest to do, if a company is targeting two different countries in the same language? thanks, jaan
Web Design | | JaanMSonberg0 -
Best Practice issue: Modx vs Wordpress
Lately I've been working a lot with Modx to create a new site for our own firm as well for other projects. But so far I haven't seen the advantages for SEO purposes other then the fact that with ModX you can manage almost everything yourself including snippets etc without to much effort. Wordpress is a known factor for blogging and since the last 2 years or so for websites. My question is: Which platform is better suited for SEO purposes? Which should I invest my time in? ModX or Wordpress? Hope to hear your thought on the matter
Web Design | | JarnoNijzing0 -
Footer Links Good or bad?
Hi Can anyone answer this question confidently, I know Google is moving away from lots of links within the footer. However we specialise in websites for the travel industry and having a link to all the areas at the footer can be quite handy. Our websites complete this automatically. Here is an example where due to design of the site the links don't quite fit well, so we need to change anyway. But before completing the work I wondered if there was a better way to do this. http://www.dreamvillasitaly.com/ Many thanks Andy
Web Design | | iprosoftware0 -
Where is the best place to put reciprocal links on our website?
Where should reciprocal links be placed on our website? Should we create a "Resources" page? Should the page be "hidden" from the public? I know there is a right answer out there! Thank you for your help! Jay
Web Design | | theideapeople0 -
Recommended Website Monitoring Tools
Hi, I was wondering what people would recommend for website monitoring (IE is my website working as it should!). I need something that will:
Web Design | | James77
1/. Allow multiple page monitoring not just homepage
2/. Do header status checking
3/. Do page content checking (ie if the page changes massively, or include the word "error") then we have an issue!
4/. Multiple alert possibilities. We currently use www.websitepulse.com and it is a good service that does all the above, however it just seems so overly complex that its hard to understand what is going on, and its complex functionality and features are really a negative in our case. Thanks0