What Should You Do With Two Websites After an Acquisition?

What Should You Do With Two Websites After an Acquisition?

Pick one domain to carry the business forward, move the acquired site's best pages onto it with permanent redirects, and keep those redirects live for at least a year. Running both sites forever looks safe and quietly costs you rankings, budget and buyer confusion for years.

This lands on web teams more often than people expect. The deal closes, the press release goes out, and six months later there are still two homepages, two blogs saying similar things, and two sets of pages competing for the same searches.

The decision is not really a technical one. It is a positioning decision with a technical execution plan behind it. Here is how we work through both.

Why Is Running Both Sites Indefinitely the Expensive Option?

Because you pay twice for everything and split the signals that make either site rank. Two sites means two content calendars, two design systems, two sets of dependencies, two security surfaces, and two teams who each think the other one owns the overlap.

The search cost is subtler. When two domains you control publish similar pages about the same topic, you are not doubling your chances. You are competing with yourself for the same result, and asking Google to choose. It will choose, and you may not like which one it picks.

There is also a buyer cost that nobody puts in the deal model. A prospect who lands on the acquired brand's site, reads outdated positioning, and fills in a form that routes to a mailbox nobody watches is a lost deal caused by an unfinished migration.

How Do You Decide Which Domain Survives?

Start from where the business is going, not from which site has more traffic today. Traffic can be moved. Brand equity and contractual obligations often cannot.

We work through four questions. Which name will the combined company sell under in three years? Which domain do existing customers type from memory? Are there contracts, integrations or partner listings tied to a specific domain? And which site has the deeper base of links and mentions that would be expensive to rebuild?

When the answers conflict, the naming decision wins. Migrating traffic is a known, bounded piece of work. Explaining for the next five years why your website has a different name from your company is not.

The one case where we advise keeping two domains is when the acquired product serves a genuinely different buyer with a different budget holder, and the two stories cannot be told on one site without confusing both. That is rare, and it is a decision to revisit annually rather than a permanent settlement.

What Does Google Actually Recommend for a Site Move?

Google's Search Central documentation on site moves with URL changes is specific. It recommends server-side permanent redirects where possible, naming HTTP 301 and 308, and says to keep those redirects in place for as long as possible, generally at least one year.

The same documentation covers Search Console's Change of Address tool and narrows its scope clearly. You only need it when moving from one domain or subdomain to another, such as example.com to example.net. It is not for moving from HTTP to HTTPS, and not for changing paths inside a domain you already own.

Google also asks you to submit an updated sitemap containing the new URLs once redirects are live, and says you can then remove the old sitemap because Google will use the new one going forward. That step gets skipped constantly, and it is the cheapest thing on the whole list.

Which Redirect Types Does Google Treat as Permanent?

Fewer than most teams assume, and the distinction decides whether your rankings move with you. Google's redirects documentation lists HTTP 301 and 308 as permanent, and adds meta refresh set to zero seconds and JavaScript location redirects to the same group. For those, Googlebot follows the redirect and the indexing pipeline uses it as a signal that the target should be canonical.

HTTP 302, 303 and 307, along with delayed meta refresh and delayed HTTP refresh, are treated as temporary. Googlebot still follows them, but the indexing pipeline does not use them as a canonical signal. A migration wired up with 302s will move your visitors and leave your rankings behind.

Google also names what it calls crypto redirects, meaning a plain text link telling people the content moved, and advises against relying on them to tell search engines about a move unless you have no other choice. We have inherited more than one migration held together by exactly that.

If you want the fuller treatment of redirect mechanics, our guide to website redirects goes deeper on implementation.

How Do You Map Old Pages to New Ones Without Guessing?

Build the map from data before you build anything else. Export every URL on the acquired site that has earned a link, a ranking, or a visit in the last twelve months. That list, not the sitemap, is what you are migrating.

Then assign every URL on it one of three outcomes. It redirects to a specific equivalent page on the surviving site. It redirects to the closest parent page because no equivalent exists and none will. Or it returns a 410 because the content is genuinely gone and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

The rule we hold to is that a redirect must land on a page that answers the same question. Mass-redirecting a few hundred blog posts to the new homepage is technically a redirect and practically a deletion. Google will treat it as one, and so will the reader.

Where two pages on the two sites say the same thing, decide which survives before the move rather than after. Publishing both and sorting it out later is how you end up needing our notes on canonical URLs and duplicate content.

When Should You Keep the Acquired Domain Alive Anyway?

Keep the domain registered permanently, even after the site is gone. Letting it lapse hands a domain with your customers' trust, your old links and your email history to whoever buys it next. Renewal is cheap insurance against a problem that is impossible to fix afterwards.

Keep the site itself alive in two situations. When the acquired brand has active contractual commitments such as support portals, status pages or documentation that customers depend on. And when regulated disclosures live there and legal needs time to move them properly.

Neither of those requires a marketing site. They require the specific pages that carry the obligation, on a stripped-back version of the site, with everything else redirected.

How Long Does the Traffic Dip Last?

Expect weeks, not days, and plan for the possibility of longer. Google's documentation says that for medium-sized websites it can take a few weeks or more for the new URLs to gradually start showing instead of the old ones, and that larger sites typically take longer.

In our experience the shape matters more than the depth. A dip that starts recovering within the first few weeks is a normal reprocessing curve. A dip that is still flat after a couple of months usually means something structural, most often redirects that were never wired up, redirect chains that lose the signal, or pages mapped to the wrong targets.

Take a full baseline before you move anything. Rankings, sessions and conversions by page, exported and stored outside the analytics tool. Without it you will spend the post-launch weeks arguing about whether the dip is normal, with no way to answer.

What Do You Tell Buyers While the Move Happens?

Say it plainly on both sites before you redirect anything. A short note that names the acquiring company, says what happens to the product, and tells customers who their contact is now. Buyers forgive a changed logo. They do not forgive discovering the change from a redirect.

Keep the acquired brand's name visible on the surviving site for at least a year, on a page that explains the relationship. People search for the old name for a long time after the deal, and that page is what lets them find you, and what lets an answer engine connect the two names correctly.

Our broader checklist for this kind of move is in migrating a website without losing SEO, which covers the sequencing in more detail.

What Would We Tell a Team Starting This Tomorrow?

Decide the surviving domain first, before anyone opens a design tool. Everything downstream, the redirect map, the content merge, the navigation, the email domains, depends on that one answer, and every week it stays open costs you a week of duplicated work.

Then treat the migration as a project with a baseline, a map, a launch and a monitoring window, rather than as a task at the end of a rebrand. The teams that come out of this well are not the ones with the cleverest redirect rules. They are the ones who knew what they had before they moved it.

If you are staring at two websites and trying to work out which one should survive, we are happy to walk through the trade-offs with you. Find us at phoenix.studio.