Domain Redirects After a Business Acquisition — Keep Every Customer Reachable

TL;DR: Acquired a company? Redirect their domain to yours immediately — preserves SEO value, catches their customers, consolidates traffic. Set up with Domain-Forward.com (free plan). Path forwarding + HTTPS included.

You just acquired a company. Along with the product, team, and customers, you now own their domain. That domain has:

• Backlinks from years of content and partnerships
• Bookmarks in thousands of customers’ browsers
• Links in signed contracts and official documents
• Google search rankings for valuable keywords
• Email addresses people still contact

If you let that domain go dark, you lose all of it. The SEO value disappears. Customers can’t find you. Partners think the company shut down.

A 301 redirect solves everything in 5 minutes.

Acquisition Domain Checklist

Day 1: After deal close

1. Secure domain access — Get registrar credentials for the acquired domain
2. Don’t change anything yet — Keep existing hosting live until redirect is ready
3. Document the domain — Note all subdomains, email addresses, and DNS records
4. Check backlinks — Review link profile in Google Search Console or Ahrefs

Week 1: Set up redirects

1. Add redirect — Acquired domain → your domain (instructions below)
2. Enable path forwarding — Preserve deep links where possible
3. Submit Google Search Console Change of Address
4. Update key partner links — Ask top referral sources to link to your domain directly

Month 1+: Monitor and maintain

1. Track traffic decay — Monitor how many hits the old domain still gets
2. Keep domain registered — Renew indefinitely
3. Don’t remove the redirect — Links to the acquired domain will be clicked for years

Setup

Step 1: Sign up at Domain-Forward.com

Free, no credit card.

Step 2: Add the redirect

• Source: acquiredcompany.com (add both root and www)
• Destination: https://yourcompany.com (or a specific landing page)
• Type: 301 (permanent)
• Path forwarding: Enable if URL structures align

Step 3: Update DNS on the acquired domain

Step 4: Submit Google Search Console Change of Address

If you had Search Console access for the acquired domain, submit a Change of Address to speed up re-indexing. Details in our SEO preservation guide.

Step 5: Wait and verify

DNS propagation: 1-4 hours. SSL provisioned automatically. Test with our redirect tester tool.

Multiple Acquisitions

If you’ve acquired several companies over time, redirect all their domains:

Domain-Forward.com’s free plan covers 5 domains. For larger portfolios, paid plans with API access enable programmatic management.

The SEO Value Is Real

A domain that’s been live for years accumulates:

• Domain authority — backlinks from many sources
• Indexed pages — Google has crawled and ranked content
• Brand searches — people search for the acquired company by name

A 301 redirect passes ~90-99% of this value to your domain. Without it, you lose an asset you paid for as part of the acquisition.

See also: Mergers & acquisitions use case, Company rebrand guide.

Don’t Waste What You Acquired

The domain is one of the most valuable assets in an acquisition. Protect it with a permanent redirect — catch every customer, preserve every backlink, consolidate all traffic onto your primary domain.

Create your free account, redirect the acquired domain, keep it running permanently. Email on the acquired domain stays working — MX records are separate from web records. Handle email migration on your own timeline.