301 Redirects After Company Acquisition

[pbhatt]

We recently acquired a company, and now we are going to redirect all of the pages on their site to their respective pages on our site. Do we need to keep the original pages on their site active? For how long?

Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible?

Thanks!

[RyanKent]

Once the redirect is in place and you have confirmed it is working, you can immediately remove the old site.

I would highly recommend monitoring your sites on a daily basis for 404 errors after the move. Also ensure your 404 page is as helpful as possible. It should contain your normal site's navigation and a search function.

[rtavs]

Hi pbhatt,

I agree with Ryan on this one. I would recommend using a combination one of the following tools to keep an eye on any broken links or 404 pages on the new site:

• Xenu Link Sleuth
• Screaming Frog
• Google Webmaster Tools
• SEO Moz crawler tool

Hope this helps

[EGOL]

Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible?

Be sure that you don't save ten bucks on hosting but toss away thousand in content and the value of a redirect.

I would sniff the entire site for gems of content.  Anything that is better than what you currently have or supplemental to it.  If you can get new pages on your site that target keywords that have been off of your radar that could be a huge win.

Now... just saying what I do rather than disagree with others....  I keep an .htaccess file on that old domain for a long time - meaning forever....  you can do that inexpensively by getting a hosting service that will allow you to place multiple domains in different folders of a single account and redirect them.  Since I don't know exactly how long it will take for search engines to permanently remember I make it impossible for them to miss.