Migration Challenge Question

[Kenn_Gold]

I work for a company that recently acquired another company and we are in the process of merging the brands.

Right now we have two website, lets call them:

www.parentcompanyalpha.com

www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com

We are working with a web development company who is designing our brand new site, which will launch at the end of September, we can call that www.parentacquired.com.

Normally it would be simple enough to just 301 redirect all content from www.parentcompanyalpha.com and www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com to the mapped migrated content on www.parentacquired.com.

But that would be too simple. The reality is that only 30% of www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com will be migrating over, as part of that acquired business is remaining independent of the merged brands, and might be sold off.

So someone over there mirrored the www.acquiredcompanyalpha.com site and created an exact duplicate of www.acquiredcompanybravo.com.

So now we have duplicate content for that site out there (I was unaware they were doing this now, we thought they were waiting until our new site was launched).

Eventually we will want some of the content from acquiredcompanyalpha.com to redirect to acquiredcompanybravo.com and the remainder to parentacquired.com.

What is the best interim solution to maintain as much of the domain values as possible?  The new site won't launch until end of September, and it could fall into October. I have two sites that are mirrors of each other, one with a domain value of 67 and the new one a lowly 17. I am concerned about the duplicate site dragging down that 67 score.

I can ask them to use rel=canonical tags temporarily if both sites are going to remain until Sept/Oct timeframe, but which way should they go?  I am inclined to think the best result would be to have acquiredcompanybravo.com rel=canonical back to acquiredcompanyalpha.com for now, and when the new site launches, remove those and redirect as appropriate. But will that have long term negative impact on acquiredcomapnybravo.com?

Sorry, if this is convoluted, it is a little crazy with people in different companies doing different things that are not coordinated.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Kenn,

I think I understand all that.

In this situation, you could always use a 302 temporary redirect rather than canonical and tell Google that pages will be returning to normal at some point, and in the meantime, a 302 doesn't pass page rank so in theory, nothing should move and it shouldn't have any negative impact. It removes the duplication issue nicely.

A canonical will pass some page rank, and as a result, this might mess things up for you.

-Andy

[ATP]

Andy's suggestion seems perfect to me!

This is kind of an extreme example of what 302's were meant to do. Your content will remain exactly where it needs to be for reference purposes and the eventual 301 redirects when your new website goes live. Meanwhile the bravo site with your duplicated content will no longer be duplicated and no link juice or rankings are going anywhere. (In theory)

Minimal work as if the site is an exact copy it will take only a couple of lines to redirect the whole site.

[Kenn_Gold]

Thanks Andy -  I am so accustomed to thinking in permanent changes and in 301s and rel=canonical, that the obvious 302 skipped my thinking.  While I am unsure if they will be willing to 302 in this interim period, it certainly will be my primary recommendation now.

Thanks for reading though that, it was actually a challenge to try to detail out.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

it was actually a challenge to try to detail out.

It certainly seemed so

And you are very welcome - glad to have been able to help.

-Andy