Redirecting and site history

[spiffytech]

My company created a new, independant software product several years ago, but now wants to incorporate it into our main offering, and stop selling it independantly. We want to take the domain for the old product, and 301 redirect it to the domain of the main one.

We know that it will kill all history for the old product's domain in Google, but we need to know if it will have any effect on the main product's domain. We're 99% sure it won't, but we want to be 100%.

[Robert_Charlton]

We want to take the domain for the old product, and 301 redirect it to the domain of the main one.

spiffytech - First, this shouldn't hurt the main domain, unless the old one had a penalty of some sort, which, judging from your caution, doesn't sound likely.

Unless you prefer to redirect to the default main domain, I'd suggest that you redirect the old domain to a new interior page on your main domain... perhaps the default page of a new directory... and have this new page contain content similar to the old material you're redirecting.

Eventually (particularly if you can get some of your old links changed), the history is likely to be credited to the new page or pages. Because deep links can be hard to get, you might get an extra benefit doing it this way.