Hi,
We are about to purchase a competitors website, and would like some pointers on making the most from it.
Would it be best to simply setup a 301/302 back to our own site?
Their domain was registered in 1997 and currently still has their e-commerce software running on it.
Please let me know if you need more info.
Thanks
Floob.
It depends what you’re doing with the business. Are you simply dissolving their business and absorbing everything into your existing one? Or will you continue to operate it as a separate brand?
Hi,
It is most likely we would want to dissolve their business and roll into ours.
We dont really want the overhead of running another brand, but would like to leverage their existing SEO and domain age.
In which case, I would say that the best thing to do is to put a 301 redirect from their home page to your home page and then to try to match up as many of their pages with pages on your existing site and put a 301 redirect on those. You should then create a specific page on your site to redirect all non-matching pages to, which should briefly explain that you have taken over the business, maybe give some of the benefits that this takeover can offer customers, and then some top-level site navigation to help them find their way round. This is a much more user-friendly solution than what usually happens, which is to just dump everyone at your home page with no further explanation or clues as to where to go or why the site doesn’t look like what they were expecting.
Thats great, thanks very much for your help.
301 make sense and i know managing two brands/sites is a big pain, but in terms of ranking in the serps you now have the choice to rank for two listings which is something to consider.
Analyze their backlinks and if you have a chance to have backlinks from their sources, do it…
I would get a list to ALL backlinks across the web so you have some initial data to compile so you know what direct to head with your newly purchased site when you do NEW SEO.