Acquired a company, what should be done with their website?

[AdamEgarr]

Hi,

I work for a furniture company that essentially purchased another furniture store some time back a few years ago.

However, this furniture store that was acquired had a website. The website has no existing pages anymore, only the homepage. The homepage has a message on it describing how it's been taken over and then links to our website.

The spam score for the website is 8. I was wondering if there was something else we should do instead of the link, whether that be a straight 301 redirect or if we should have the link at all considering its score.

I can provide more information and links if needed.

Thanks in advance,

Adam

[LauraSultan]

You'll want to do a risk assessment of the domain before set up 301-redirects to your site.  Set it up in Google Search Console if you haven't already. Check for any manual actions or malware warnings associated with the site.  Then you'll want to audit the backlinks to check for any problems there.

If you can share the link with the community, someone else might find issues that you don't see.

I suspect the spam score would be lower if the site was more than one page. Right now, it probably seems like a doorway page since it's just one page that links to another site.

[AdamEgarr]

Hi Laura,

Thanks for your answer, I'll do just that and follow your advice.

The site is http://scadgells.co.uk/

It doesn't appear to have any backlinks from what I can see and we appear above the site for brand specific searches in Google.

[TimHolmes]

Just doing a quick test in Opensite explorer it would appear that http://www.scadgells.co.uk has a couple of external backlinks links from a website called furniturebuyer.info, where as http://scadgell.co.uk has no backlinks. The links are from a relevant source, but doubt will provide you with a huge boost.

If you can access OSE, I would suggest looking at the following link for the www. domain too just incase there are a few more elements.
https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/pages?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.scadgells.co.uk As well as the backlinks it also appears to show a possible 7 indexed pages which you may want to redirect or even 404 depending on what they were originally about. None of the pages deeper than the homepage appear to have any backlinks.

Hope that also helps.

Cheers Tim

[AdamEgarr]

That's great. Thanks Tim.