When faced with a client who has acquired a company I am always asked (from an SEO perspective) whether to roll the site content into the main site or leave the site live - against the wishes of marcom - in order to use the 'power' of the acquired site's rankings, links and page rank to benefit the acquiring company. I say it depends many things. I would love to hear what the esteemed members here have to say.

Barbara,

Very good question and as you know I've been faced with that very situation on multiple occasions. Like you said, it depends specifically on what the go forward strategy is to be. If the intent is to go forward with a more robust paid strategy in which more positions may be captured from multiple paid listings then keeping the sites separate would make sense, as long as the sites are unique enough to capture a somewhat different demographic and the argument can be made to the engines that there is enough differentiation to warrant multiple camapaigns.

On the organic side, it again depends on many factors, such as how complementary the sites are to each other and how well can a 301 migration strategy be employed that will allow page specific redirects (on category pages for example) to a complementary page on the host site. Also when the acquiring company has a web presence that is new and not very well indexed and the acquired company has a strong link popularity, decent indexing and aging, it might make sense to redirect all sites to the more powerful one although from a business perspective, that is not always possible.

In two specific examples that I am thinking of, both scenarios were tossed around and what finally ended up happening is that the acquired companies were migrated to the same platform and database structure as the acquiring company so as to minimize IT expenditures and the complexities of maintaining multiple experts on hand who were familiar with two distinct platforms. The web presence of both were maintained as separate websites and complementary cross linking across the home pages, portfolio pages and certain category pages (that again were complementary) to the other site was done. For enterprise level sites this might make the most sense, especially if there is a combined SEO/SEM effort and the first scenario strategy for PPC is to be employed.