How to Redirect a Website After an Acquisition: An 8-Step Guide

An acquisition ends a website, but not its traffic. Bookmarks, search results, printed material and links on other sites keep pointing at the old domain for months, often years. If the domain only forwards to the new owner's homepage, every one of those visitors lands somewhere they did not ask for and has to search again.

Agencies usually meet this after the handover: the hosting is gone, the domain sits at a registrar, and the client asks whether the old Careers or Contact page can still work. These eight steps cover it without bringing a server back.

1. List the URLs people still use#

Start from evidence, not from the old sitemap. The pages that still get visits are the ones worth a rule of their own. Useful sources:

• The Pages report in Search Console for the old domain, if you still have access.
• Landing pages with entrances in the last 12 months of analytics.
• Backlink reports: the pages other sites link to.
• The pages people ask about: careers, contact, product and support pages, price lists and PDFs.

If the hosting is already offboarded, its logs are gone with it. A redirect service starts recording requests from the day the domain points to it, which helps with step 7.

2. Map each URL to its new home#

For each old URL, pick the page on the new owner's site that answers the same need: the old Careers page goes to the new Jobs page, an old product page to the matching product. Use the homepage only where nothing matches. Search engines treat a mass redirect to a homepage like a missing page, so the old page's ranking signals are lost instead of passed on.

Keep the map in a spreadsheet with two columns, old URL and new URL. It doubles as the import file later, and as the record you hand to the client.

3. Keep the old domain registered#

Do not let the old domain expire. A lapsed domain can be registered by anyone, including people who buy expired domains for their traffic. Agree who renews it, the client or the new owner, and for how long, and write it down. A redirect needs nothing more than the registration and its DNS.

4. Know why registrar forwarding is not enough#

Most registrars offer domain forwarding, and it is often the first thing set up after a handover. It typically sends the whole domain to one address, so old-domain.com/careers and old-domain.com/contact end on the same page. Some registrars also handle HTTPS poorly on forwarded domains, which shows visitors a certificate warning before the redirect happens.

Forwarding is fine for the domain root. Page-level rules need a redirect service or a web server.

5. Run the redirects without a server#

Renting hosting again only to answer redirects is more than the job needs. A redirect service keeps the rules for you: the domain stays at its registrar, you point its DNS to the service, and each rule sends one source to one destination.

With RedirHub, that is a domain redirect for the root and one rule per page from your map; a longer map goes in as a bulk import. The DNS change is explained in What DNS changes are needed for a domain redirect, and the GoDaddy steps in How to forward a GoDaddy domain with HTTPS.

6. Use permanent 301 redirects, over HTTPS#

The move is permanent, so use 301 redirects. They tell search engines to pass the old page's signals to the new one and to replace the old URL in their results. Keep 302 for moves you plan to undo; Redirect methods explained covers the differences.

Old links were often shared with https://. The redirect has to answer over HTTPS with a valid certificate for the old domain, or visitors see a browser warning instead of the new page. RedirHub issues that certificate automatically once the DNS points to it.

7. Test, then watch the traffic#

Check each rule before you tell the client it is done. curl -I https://old-domain.com/careers should return a single 301 with the new page in its Location header. Try http:// and https://, with and without www, and make sure no rule leads to another redirect.

After launch, watch which old URLs still get requests. A URL that gets traffic but has no rule of its own belongs in the map; one that gets none can stay with the rule for the domain.

8. Plan the hand-off and the exit#

Agree how long the redirects stay. Search results usually move to the new URLs within a few months, but bookmarks and links on other sites keep sending people much longer, so keep the rules for at least a year. Write down who owns the redirect account and the domain renewal, and when the rules can be paused or removed.

An example: three rules after an acquisition#

EZMarketing, an agency in Lancaster, PA, met exactly this after a manufacturing client was acquired. The domain was already forwarded at GoDaddy and the hosting offboarded. Three rules, for the domain, Careers and Contact, went live in ten minutes, and the old Careers link has sent every visitor to the new Jobs page since. Read the EZMarketing story.