Two companies merge: website A redirect 301 to website B. Problems?

[NN-online]

Hi,

last december the company I work for and another company merged. The website of company A was taken offline and the home page was 302 redirected to a page on website B. This page had information about the merger and the consequences for customers. The deeper pages of website A were 301 redirected to similar pages on website B.

After a while, the traffic from the redirected home page decreased and we thought it was time to change the redirect from a 302 into a 301 redirect to the home page. Because there are still a lot of links to the home page of website A and we wanted to preserve the link juice.

Two weeks ago we changed the 302 redirect from website A into a 301 redirect to the home page of website B. Last week the Google webmaster tools account of website B showed the links from the 301 redirected website A.

The total amount of links doubled and the top anchor text is the name of company A instead of company B.

This, off course, could trigger an alarm at Google. Because we got a lot of new links with a different anchor text. A tactic used by spammers/black-hats.

I am a bit worried that our change will be penalized by Google.

But our change is legit. It is to the advantage of our customers to find us if they search for the name of company A or click on a link to website A.

We didn´t change the change of address of domain A in Google webmaster tools yet. Is it a good idea to change the change of address of domain A into domain B?

Are there other precautions we can take?

[EGOL]

It is a good thing to ask questions when you are uncertain about something that can be as important as a corporate website.

A website has content assets, link assets, ranking assets, traffic assets, branding assets that can be lost when a site is left go.  Each one of these should be evaluated before moving away from a domain.  Simply doing a 302 redirect abandons almost all of them.  This can be an enormous financial loss.

A 301 redirect is the best way to go if you simply want to transfer link equity and type in traffic to the new domain.  My question is... Has this been done correctly?

Also, do you have server logs or analytics from the old domain?  If you do you can use them to figure out which pages on the old domain were pulling traffic and for what keywords.  If there is nice traffic coming into the site for them then it would be a good idea to consider getting the original content from the old site and moving it to the new site.  It might not be too late to redirect the URLs on the old site directly to the new URLs on the new site that hold this content.

If I was you I would consider getting a paid consultation from someone experienced in SEO and moving domains in specific who can look deeply into the data from the old site and recommend how to best capitalize it on a new site.  You could be walking away from thousands to millions of future dollars in revenue.

[NN-online]

Thank you very much.

The redirect has been done correctly. Nothing to worry about there.

The only thing I am worried about is the enormous amount of new links we received through the redirect. In a post penguin world, this could be a threat.

Is it a good idea to change the GWT change of address  of domain A into domain B?

Or other precautions?

[Mike_c]

Is it a good idea to change the GWT change of address  of domain A into domain B?

Just make sure you don't change to a subfolder or subdomain (box.domain.com or domain.com/box)

Mike