301 Redirect Domain or 301 Redirect Domain + Interior Pages

[Room214]

Hello - My company acquired another company in our industry and our IT team immediately set up the acquired companies domain name as a an alias to our site.

This created a duplicate version of our website under another domain name and Google started ranking interior pages from the aliased acquired site for several top keywords that were previously held by our real site.

Should we 301 redirect just the top level domain name of the acquired site to the real site or 301 redirect the top level domain name and the interior pages on the acquired site to help ensure that our real domain will take back the rankings it once had?

Thanks!

[NakulGoyal]

Yes, I would recommend you remove the alias.

Next, I would suggest you redirect the specific pages from the old domain/site of the company you acquired to the pages that make most sense for the user on your site. Like if you took over certain products from that company and merged them into your products (or services), a 301 from the products page to your products page would make sense and so on.

This will pass on the SEO value to the respective pages much better rather then a complete redirect from the entire site to just your homepage.

I suggested this based on the fact that you wrote, the acquired company's domain is ranking better, which demonstrates the presence of some sort of authority in terms of backlinks and trust and aging factor in the SERPS.

[lavellester]

Ultimately you'll probably want your primary (real site domain) ranking for the keywords so you'll want to 301 redirect the acquired site to the primary domain.

As the site content is essentially one and the same you'll be able to set-up a wildcard 301 redirect, at the server level (Apache/IIS) which will take care of the interior pages

[Room214]

Thanks for the insight Nakul.

[Room214]

Thanks for the response. Can you expand on the "wildcard redirect". Our it team set up a 301 redirect so that any URL on the acquired site redirects to the home page of the primary site. So for example:

www.aquired.com/interior-page-1 redirects to www.primary.com

instead of

www.primary.com/interior-page-1

Any thoughts on this set-up.

[lavellester]

Yeah so if you want pages on the acquired site to go to corresponding pages on the primary site like you mention above

www.aquired.com/interior-page-1 >> redirects >> www.primary.com/interior-page-1

then you can create 301 redirect with a regular expression pattern with wild card to capture the URL and reuse them in the target URL.

If you have lots URLs then this will be quickest way rather creating an entry for every possible URL.

Hope this helps

[Room214]

Totally - thanks!