I have a client who recently bought out a competitor.
The competitor's website, www.competitor.com is currently using a meta refresh to send all traffic to my client, www.myclient.com
Competitor wishes to close hosting account and forward all traffic directly using DNS settings. However, my client's IT department has contacted me, the developer of www.myclient.com believing that I need to put some sort of code/tag/direct, etc onto the server of the existing site.
I think he's confused. Any .htaccess 301 redirect would go on the server servign up www.competitor.com, correct? If competitor chooses to reroute the dns to forward cometitor.com to www.myclient.com, the index.php page will be server up as normal.
But for some reason IT department guy thinks I need to add some sort of redirection, because he believes that "the dns changes he is going to make won't tell the site which page to serve up.". Huh?
Any thoughts?
They will need to do a 301 redirect on their own server, in order to get the browser bar to show the parent site name. It would be silly to maintain the old site just to do a 301 redirect to the parent site. They will also have to set-up a virtual host on the parent site.
It sounds like:
(1) Their IT guy doesn't know how to do this.
(2) He is confusing two different issues. It sounds like they want to serve-up a different home page (at least) for the acquired company. I'd guess a "we've bought company y" message. The virtual host will allow him to do this.
(3) Reality is it is probably quite a bit more complicated to really get it right. You'd need to 301-redirect not just the home page, but key inner pages (that might be bookmarked by users, or linked-to by other sites) to their equivalents at the new site. I can almost guarantee the IT guy doesn't know how to use mod_rewrite...
