Our organization recently merged with another one; both orgs have their own website on different hosts. The intention is to transfer the domain of the other organization www.otherdomain.com to our host.
Incidentally, it seems both domains have the same "sponsoring registrar".
I'd like to have -once the domain is transferred- www.otherdomain.com to point to a specific page of our website or better said to a subfolder of it, let's call it www.ourdomain.com/other/.
Here I would place a page explaining the situation and redirect to the home page of www.ourdomain.com.
The host told me that they cannot point a domain name to a specific page and that this needs to be done via code.
What is exactly needed? Since we are in a shared hosting environment I must get these things done by them.
My guess is that I need to ask them to add a virtual host entry for www.otherdomain.com aliasing to www.ourdomain.com/other/ in the apache config file of our website, but I am not sure. I am not allowed to use mod_rewrite and various other commands in the .htaccess files. What else can I do?
If the above is doable, are there any issues that can affect the search engine ranking of www.ourdomain.com in a negative way?
We just want avoid that www.otherdomain.com users get confused by the changes and make them aware of the organizational change.
Thanks in advance for the help!
Might be better to put a notice at the top of each page saying what is happening, and go though over a period removing the content and replacing with a 301 from each folder to the 'nearest equivalent' on the 'new' site. Plus a custom 404 page that explains and links to the new destination.
Or simply 301 from the old to the new, and have a 404 on the 'new' site, explaining and offering local navigation (the largest proportion of 404 readers will be 'old site' people, so you can devote the 404 entirely to their needs.
