Handling redirects when 2 companies merge

[AbsoluteDesign]

I am working with 2 local businesses that are joining forces to create 1, new business.

Both individually hold consistent position 1 and 2 in Google for the majority of their chosen terms.

However, the merger will see a new brand name and therefore a fresh out of the box domain.

I have suggested setting up a partition on the hosting for both old URLS. All that will be hosted there would be .htaccess files with 301s to the like-for-like pages on the brand new domain / website. This will obviously also aid UX.

However, is this overkill? I personally think not... but would a domain level 301 redirect work just as well from preserving / passing on any authority to the new URL.

[VERBInteractive]

I wouldn't say this is overkill and setting up the like-for-like redirects from both domains is the ideal approach. Your approach makes the most sense for maintaining rank and as much authority as possible.

That being said I have never had to migrate two domains to one brand new domain. We have handle straight one to one domain migrations with decent success, although we did see a slight dip initially. Please let the community know how the migration goes and any lessons you learn along the way.

Good luck!

[KevnJr]

However, is this overkill? I personally think not... but would a domain level 301 redirect work just as well from preserving / passing on any authority to the new URL.

Not overkill in my opinion.

We have acquired several businesses, but never merged them into a new domain, so my process was to utilize the acquired domains as long as they held value. With the last competitor we acquired, I actually built out his site and it has shown immense value.

I know this is slightly off your situation topic, but it may help.

KJr

[MikeRoberts]

Based on my limited experience of this type of situation, I've felt a good start is to Canonical each page on the old domain to its counterpart on the new domain and place a call to action on the old sites letting people know of the move and/or branding change. Submit for crawl request, let the bots begin filtering through the changes without affecting user experience yet. Then after some time, so your regulars have become acclimated to the upcoming changes and so have the bots, you can 301 those pages from the old site to the relevant counterpart they were already canonicalized to.

[LauraSultan]

I'm chiming in to add a vote for Mike's strategy. I've used the same strategy with great success when rebranding a business and moving it from one site to another.