Company is spliting up and moving to new domains, trying to keep link juice going forward

[T-wrench]

A company I am doing SEO work for is splitting into 3 and will be hosted on three separate domains. I am getting 2 of the 3, however, I am not getting the domain that has most links going to it.

What is the best practice to carry any link juice going to my divisions to the new domain names? Should I contact sites linking to my divisions content on the old site and ask them to link to my new sites? Should I do 301 redirects to help carry links to my new sites?

Also, I found this guide in moz http://moz.com/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains its from 2009, but is this still considered the best practices for moving to new domains or is there an updated guide I should be using?

[sureshchowdary]

Hi Wrench,

Is it a single website or 3 seperate websites before the seperation? If you have multiple websites then you can redirect the websites so that all the link juice will be passed to the new domains. If it is a single website and if the 3 entities are seperated by folder structures. Then you can do a page by page 310 permanent redirect of the corresponding folders to the new websites if the 1st website owner allows you to do that. Then all the SEO goodies of the particular sections of the pages only will be passed to the new domains.

[RobertJakobson]

Hi, please clarify whether the 3 separate domains will be all new or will 2 of them that you handle be new and the other one be the old domain? That changes how you can do 301 redirects obviously (leading to more questions like if all 3 are new, what happens to the old domain? etc..)

Couple of steps to take:

1. Analyse your old site thoroughly with Open Site Explorer or with other Moz (or other provider's) tools. Specifically make a list of the top 200/500/.. pages with most external links, page authority and so on. It is going to be an hefty Excel file but a breeze to put together with the help of Moz professional. Takes a couple of days or so.
2. Keep the same URL structure when designing the old site, make it simpler to scan via breadcrumbs if possible.
3. Do specific canonical URLs for at least the  200/500/.. most important pages in the 1st page
4. Do the 301 redirects and verify them with the help of online tools.
5. Notify Google Webmaster Tools. Again It is hard to give specific instructions because I do not which domains will be new and what will happen to the old.

In theory and according to Google officially setting the canonical URL should pass the external links along to the new domain:

• Consolidating link signals for the duplicate or similar content. It helps search engines to be able to consolidate the information they have for the individual URLs (such as links to them) on a single, preferred URL. This means that links from other sites to http://example.com/dresses/cocktail?gclid=ABCD get consolidated with links to http://www.example.com/dresses/green/greendress.html.

[T-wrench]

There will be one main domain that will act as a landing page for the three divisions.

I am getting divisions that will be starting on a new domain name.