New SEO - Multiple Domains

[mkochsch]

I'm relatively new to SEO. I've inherited a company website which was, in my opinion, poorly managed for several years.
One problem is that the company management and IT department would domain squat on several names (over a dozen) which were variants on their original domain name. This has caused confusion in our user base as the current domain which draws the most traffic is not the same as the company's original email domain. This has also caused confusion with AdWords which has in the past banned the site for what I think was a "duplicate content" violation.
How to straighten this mess out is the question. One policy I'm insisting on is using only one domain name in current and future marketing materials. What do I do with the "legacy" domains which are still drawing traffic?

[joshz]

I'm not following you - can you reask?

[mkochsch]

Geez, I don't know, maybe it's more an IT question. Look at it this way. Say three companies, all with different site names (say pink-toilets.com, blue-toilets.com and white-toilets.com), merged into one new company and they use the merge company's domain name (blue-toilet.com). How long do you use redirect techniques (and which) to keep traffic funneling to the one new super site. What if the site which generated the most traffic (say 70 per cent was at white-toilet.com) was one of the companies which was absorbed in the merger? Clear as mud I know.

[Jocelyn]

If you only want the main domain to rank and remove the others, just do a redirect 301 of satellite site's pages to the main site one.

[joshz]

Geez, I don't know, maybe it's more an IT question. Look at it this way. Say three companies, all with different site names (say pink-toilets.com, blue-toilets.com and white-toilets.com), merged into one new company and they use the merge company's domain name (blue-toilet.com). How long do you use redirect techniques (and which) to keep traffic funneling to the one new super site. What if the site which generated the most traffic (say 70 per cent was at white-toilet.com) was one of the companies which was absorbed in the merger? Clear as mud I know.

Oh, I see.

Well, ideally (from an SEO aspect only) you'd want to redirect (301) the 2 lower powered domains to the domain with the highest authority and ranking.

A recent video released by Cutts admits that 301 pass 100% link juice. Therefore, placing (as stated above) 301 redirects in place for the 2 domains that are no longer used or focused on would be your best bet.

Moreover, if the sites are all similar as described, you'd be better off investing more time and redirected page by page more so than domain wide.

So the products>toilets>product.html redirects to the NEW or KEPT site's products page or most relevant page there after.

How long? I would say the life of the site. A domain is 10 bucks a year, it makes no logical sense to dump them. I would allow 30-60 days before Google crawls and reindexes the changes.

I hope that answered your question.

[Test-ok]

especially if you have duplicate content between the different toilets.