301 Redirect? How to leverage the traffic on our old domain.

[HuskyCargo]

I've seen multiple questions about this but there's a few different answers on ways to approach it. Figured I'd personally ask for our situation. Any advice would be appreciated.

We formed a new company with a new name / domain while at the same time buying an existing company in our industry.

The domain and site of the company we acquired is ranking for some valuable keywords and still getting a significant amount of traffic (about half of what our new site is getting). A big downside has been, when they moved that site to a different server, something happened to where the site became uneducable so it's full of bad pricing and information. Because of that, we've had a maintenance page up for a little bit because it was generating calls to our sales team (GOOD) but the customer was having seen incredibly incorrect information (BAD)

Rather than correcting those issues or figuring out why the site is un-editable, we just want to find a way where we can leverage that traffic and have them end up at our new site. Would we 301 redirect the entire domain to our new one? If we did that would the old domain still keep the majority of it's page rank?

[Shakur]

Hi  HuskyCargo,

Could be the best chance that you have to leverage the traffic from the old site is a 301 redirect.

Forger about Page Rank, is dead you can find out the information in this 2 sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GlxLlpm3Ew#t=16 and searchengineland.com/google-toolbar-pagerank-finally-officially-dead-205277.

Good luck

[sureshchowdary]

Check the serve access permissions in the hosting server. Read only might be the reason the site is un-editable. Change the access permissions and see.

When it comes to 301 redirection 1-1 mapping is the best method. It takes 1 week for the changes to be impacted. After a week the keyword positions of the old website will be retained with the new website. There can be a slight drop in the traffic.

[DennisSeymour]

301 the domain over to capitalize fully but it sounds like you might want to keep both sites active.

If you have content that you want to move over or is ranking, be sure to create separate 301 from the old url to the new url. The page that receives the 301 will benefit from that. In many cases, the new url will rank in the place of the old one.

If they have pages that have great backlinks (like an about page or products page) but you don't really want to move them over and want to just delete them, then just 301 those urls to relevant urls on your site and you will benefit from their links.

Hope that helps! Good luck!