What to do when buying out your competition?

Need advices...

[zoltan]

So, you are big enough with community website and planning to buy out your competition. You have 100,000 members (A site) and your competition has 30,000 members (B site) (just examples).
Obviously, both you and your competition have tens of thousands of indexed pages in the search engines and receive around 40-60% of your traffic from SE. The used software and file strcuture is different in both sites. Also, you prefer to integrate members and content from your competition. If you can do this, it is great, if not, you simply send out emails (maybe 2-3 times in a matter of months) to B members to join A.

How to effectively integrate B in A?
- we do not want to lose rankings of B in search engines, what is the best way to keep this?
- how to redirect B to A? sitewide B redirect to a specific page in A where we describe that site B has been bought by site A?
- what else we need to take care of to maximize the buy out?

[Quadrille]

When you buy out a community, you may be simply "removing competition".

If you want it to be more than that, it's not technology that's the issue, but a personal approach to the 'new' members, and ensuring they feel welcome in their 'new' home.

If the systems are as non-compatible as they sound, any attempts at automation are likely to backfire on you.

What you really want is as many as possible of their active members to join you; unlike other competitors, you have their email addresses and (I assume) a system to use them.

A priority is to identify key members (moderators etc) who will be useful members, and will (hopefully) bring others with them. You cannot buy charisma, but you can ask them nicely ;)

If your site is paid-for, then the easiest way is to offer a free subscription for a while, so they can see if it's for them. Otherwise, it's down to quality copy writing!

Of those 30,000 many will be inactive, and you will inevitably lose some more. Even in a worst-case scenario, you have still removed the competition!

[zoltan]

Thanks for the response.
I guess, what we need to not ignore is the existing search engine traffic that is directed to site B. Let's say site A gets 10k uniques / day from search engines, site B gets 5k uniques / day. Obviously, when you buy out site B, its traffic will be redirected to site A, so in the first days / weeks we will get around 15k traffic from search engines, but in the future this will reduce back to 10-12k a day because indexed pages from site B will be removed from search engines.
What to do to pass: rankings, PR, page value from site B to site A?

[Quadrille]

With quite incompatible forums, you will need to arrange individual 301s from key pages / topics / indexes in the old one to the new one.

man - most - of the old pages will have no direct equivalent, and probably small visitor numbers per page (old forum posts mostly don't get read).

An alternative is a site wide redirection to the new site, with a high quality 404 page to catch people on landing.

Whatever you do, it will be hard detailed work - unless you stick to a few key pages.

You time might better be spent on writing from the old directory to all that linked to it asking them to update links - a few will.

But overall, I seriously doubt most of this is worth the effort. much better to worry about making the new site a success than straining over the point of diminishing returns.

95% of any forum is "the past"; 95% of the success of any forum is now and the future.