How to Redirect One Website to Another After You've Just Bought the Company

The deal closed on a Tuesday. Somewhere in the paperwork is a line about "digital assets." That's legal-speak for a domain, some backlinks, and whatever's left of another company's website. Someone on your team says "we'll just redirect their site to ours," like it's a five-minute job.

It isn't. That gap between "just redirect it" and doing it right is where acquisitions quietly lose money. The mechanism itself is simple: a DNS record, plus an HTTP redirect. Point a domain to another website for a plain rebrand, or redirect traffic from one website to another after buying a company, and the tech is the same. What's different is the risk. Real companies have gotten this wrong in public, so the mistakes are well documented.

What you actually inherited

Start with the boring part: who has the login. The old domain's DNS sits in a registrar account. That account belongs to whoever set it up years ago, maybe a founder who just cashed out, maybe a contractor nobody's talked to since 2019, maybe an agency that stops replying the day the news breaks.

Transferring a domain between registrars can take days by itself, before you've changed anything. If nobody checks this early, you find out the hard way, usually when the renewal is due and the card on file got cancelled with the old founder's expenses.

Plan as if you won't get fast access to that DNS on day one. Build something that works the moment you do get access, not something that needs a week of emails first.

The first thing that actually breaks: email

Most people reach for the obvious move: point the whole domain at the new site and call it done. That includes the MX records, the ones that route the domain's email.

Kill those, and every @acquired-company.com inbox stops receiving mail with no warning. That includes support, sales, and any former employee whose inbox is still being watched during the handover. Customer replies to old invoices vanish. So does any password-reset email sent to that address.

A redirect only needs the records that route web traffic. Leave the MX records alone, or move them on their own separate plan, if email on that domain needs to keep working.

The backlinks you paid for

Part of what you bought, whether it shows up on a balance sheet or not, is years of other sites linking to that company's pages. It's also years of Google trusting that domain enough to rank it. That's real value, but only if the redirect keeps it.

A 301 (permanent) redirect tells search engines to move ranking credit to the new URL. A 302 (temporary) tells them not to yet. For an acquisition, where the old domain isn't coming back, use a 301.

The expensive mistake is redirecting every page to your new homepage. It's the fast way to set it up, and it throws away most of what you paid for. A product page with three years of backlinks lands on a generic homepage, and most of its ranking power doesn't come along. Map old pages to their matching new pages instead, product to product, article to article. It's more work up front, and it's the difference between keeping that traffic and slowly losing it.

This isn't theoretical:

• When ASOS took over Topshop's site, the redirect went in as one wildcard instead of page by page. topshop.com lost about 80% of its search visibility and never got it back: two decades of brand authority, gone.
• The same mistake sank LoveKnitting's UK search visibility by about 99% when it merged with LoveCrochet into LoveCrafts. A blanket redirect sent old pages to the new homepage instead of their matches.
• Even without an acquisition, WooCommerce lost over 90% of its organic visibility moving from woocommerce.com to the shorter woo.com. Five months later, they moved back and traffic recovered.

A short, memorable domain is worth less than a domain search engines already trust.

See the mechanism first

Before touching a domain that real customers and real backlinks depend on, see what a redirect actually does. Enter a destination below. We'll create a real one on our edge network in about a second, no signup needed.

Open the link, or run it through curl -I. You'll see the real 301/302 response with a Location header pointing wherever you entered. That's the whole mechanism this guide is about, live.

It's a real redirect, not a demo simulation. It just expires in 24 hours and isn't wired up to any domain yet.

The paper trail nobody remembers

The old company's URLs are scattered in places nobody on your team can search and replace: printed materials mailed out before the deal closed, another company's blog post linking to a specific page, an ad campaign someone forgot was still running, a support ticket link buried in an old email, a contract that names the old terms-of-service URL.

None of that gets fixed by redirecting the homepage. It gets fixed by a redirect that keeps the path. acquired-company.com/support/return-policy should land on the matching page on your site, not a 404, and not your homepage with no explanation.

What happens if you just let it expire

The tempting shortcut: do nothing. Let the old domain's registration lapse once the redirect feels pointless. This is the option that can hurt you months or years later.

A domain with real search authority and years of customer trust is exactly what a squatter, or a phishing operation, wants. Whoever grabs it after it lapses inherits some of that trust: old customers who still have it bookmarked, old inboxes that still whitelist mail from it, old search results still pointing to it.

This isn't hypothetical either. Security researcher Inti De Ceukelaire bought over 100 expired domains once owned by police departments, hospitals, and government agencies, for about €8 each, and ended up with access to hundreds of live email accounts and cloud storage still tied to those domains. MX records and account recovery settings just kept pointing at a domain nobody was watching anymore.

A company you retired is a smaller target than a police department. The mechanism is identical. Keep the redirect, and the registration, active for a year or two after the acquisition, even if traffic is low. It's cheap insurance against your old customers landing somewhere you don't control.

How to actually point the domain to another website, once you have access

Same mechanism no matter the registrar. The order matters more than usual when it's someone else's domain for the first time.

1. Get DNS access confirmed before you promise anyone a timeline. This is usually the real bottleneck, not the redirect.
2. Point the domain at a redirect service, not your web server directly. Usually a CNAME (or an A record for the bare domain) pointing at whatever value your redirect service gives you. This is what lets it issue SSL for the old domain and send real HTTP redirects.
3. Map real paths, not just the homepage. Pull a sitemap, a Search Console export, an old CMS export, whatever you can get. Set path-preserving rules for anything with real traffic or backlinks. Send everything else to a sensible fallback, not a blind homepage catch-all.
4. Make every rule a 301. You want the ranking signal to move for good, because the old domain isn't coming back.
5. Leave MX and any other non-web DNS records alone, unless email migration is its own separate plan.
6. Keep watching it. A path you didn't know existed will show up 404ing in the first few weeks. Catching it early is the difference between a clean handoff and a slow leak of traffic.

FAQ

Do I need the previous owner's login to redirect their domain?

You need DNS access, usually the registrar account or the ability to edit its records. If that doesn't get handed over cleanly at close, raise it early. It's a legal problem before it's a technical one.

What happens to their email during the redirect?

Nothing, if you leave the MX records alone. A redirect only changes how the domain routes web traffic, not mail. Email migration is its own project with its own risks.

How long should the redirect stay live after an acquisition?

At least a year, two is safer. Search engines take time to fully move ranking signal, and old bookmarks and inboxes take even longer to fade out. Letting the domain lapse early is how it ends up in a squatter's hands.

Will this hurt the SEO we're paying for as part of the deal?

Not if it's a real 301 with paths preserved. What destroys that value is redirecting every URL to your homepage instead of the matching page, or leaving it on a 302 so the ranking signal never fully moves.

Can I do this without server access to the old infrastructure?

Yes. You only need DNS access for the old domain, not access to whatever server used to run it. Point the DNS at a redirect service and the old infrastructure can be shut down entirely.

How do I redirect one website to another without touching the destination site?

You don't need any access to the destination, only DNS for the domain you're redirecting from. That's what makes it possible to point a domain to another website you don't own at all, not just one you just acquired.

Can I point a domain to another website for free?

Some registrars offer basic forwarding at no cost, but it often skips SSL on the source domain and defaults to a 302 instead of a 301. That's a real problem on a domain with any traffic or backlinks left. RedirectIQ's free tier lets you try the same mechanism on a free subdomain with no card required; pointing your own domain starts at $2/mo for up to 10 domains, with automatic SSL and a real 301.

Point the acquired domain and set up path-preserving redirects →