Owning five domains used to be cheap insurance. Under the new .com.au rules, it is an expensive liability. Here is how to decide which to keep and how to merge the rest without losing what you have built.
01 / NOTE
Why consolidation is suddenly urgent for Australian businesses.
Many Australian businesses hold three, five, even ten domain variants. The main brand domain, a product-specific domain, a couple of typo domains, maybe a legacy name from before a rebrand. Until now, the cost of holding these was just the annual registration fee.
The 2026 auDA policy change adds a new layer. Every .com.au and .net.au domain now needs to match a registered business name or trademark. That means each additional domain could require its own ASIC business name registration (around $650 per year with accounting fees) or a trademark (around $900 with legal fees). Five spare domains suddenly cost $3,250 to $4,500 per year just to remain eligible.
For many businesses, the rational response is consolidation: pick the strongest domain, redirect everything else to it, and let the extras go once the redirect period is over.
02 / NOTE
Pick the winner by data, not sentiment.
The domain you keep should win on at least two of three criteria: it has the most backlinks, it gets the most organic traffic, and it matches your current or intended brand name. Sentiment and history matter less than data here.
A domain you have used for fifteen years but has only 20 backlinks and 50 monthly visitors is not a strong SEO asset, even if it feels important. Conversely, a product domain with 200 quality backlinks is genuinely valuable even if it is not your primary brand name, and those backlinks should be captured through proper redirects.
If you are rethinking what your primary brand should be called, this is a natural moment to do it. Our guide on how to choose a brand name and the companion piece on brand name versus domain name cover the relationship between the two. Getting this right before you consolidate saves you from doing it twice.
03 / NOTE
Point everything to the winner with 301 redirects.
Once you have picked your primary domain, every secondary domain gets 301 redirects pointing to the corresponding pages on the primary. If the secondary domain had its own unique content, such as a product microsite, that content should be migrated to the primary domain first. Then set up the redirect.
The redirect map works the same way as a single domain migration: one old URL to one new URL. Do not bulk-redirect an entire secondary domain to your homepage. Each page with backlinks or indexed content needs a specific destination.
For the complete technical walkthrough, see our guide on how to redirect a domain without losing SEO. If this is part of a bigger move, the full domain migration checklist covers every step from crawl to reindexing.
04 / NOTE
Combine the best content, not all the content.
If two of your domains had separate websites with their own content, do not blindly dump everything onto the primary domain. Duplicate or near-duplicate content across the merged pages will confuse search engines and dilute your rankings.
Review the content from each domain and identify which pages serve unique purposes. If two domains each had an About page, pick the better one or write a new version that combines the strongest elements. If a product domain had detailed guides that do not exist on the primary domain, migrate those as new pages.
The goal is one website with more depth, not one website with more clutter. After the merge, your primary domain should have better content coverage than either domain had individually.
05 / NOTE
Bring your brand identity into alignment.
A domain consolidation often exposes inconsistencies in brand identity. The primary domain uses one logo, a product microsite uses a variation, a legacy domain still has last year’s colour scheme. Now that everything lives under one roof, the visual identity needs to match.
This is a practical opportunity, not just a cosmetic one. Consistent branding across your site increases user trust, which improves engagement metrics like time on site, pages per session and bounce rate. Those metrics indirectly support SEO performance.
Our logo generator and brand library can help you create a consistent set of brand assets for the consolidated domain. If you are unsure whether your current identity is strong enough to carry the merged properties, our piece on what brand identity actually is explains the fundamentals. For businesses working with limited resources, our guide on how to build a brand on a budget covers practical approaches.
06 / NOTE
When to keep multiple domains despite the cost.
Consolidation is not always the right answer. There are legitimate reasons to maintain separate domains even under the new compliance regime.
If you operate genuinely separate businesses under different brands that serve different customer segments, separate domains make sense. A catering company and a venue hire business may share an owner but serve different search audiences. Merging them would confuse both users and search engines.
Similarly, if a secondary domain ranks well for high-value commercial keywords that do not fit naturally on your primary brand site, the revenue from that traffic may justify the compliance cost. Run the numbers: if a product domain generates $5,000 per month in attributable revenue, the $650 annual cost of maintaining a business name for it is negligible.
The domains to let go are the defensive registrations, the typo catches and the “we might use this someday” domains that generate no traffic and hold no significant backlinks. Under the new rules, those are pure cost with no return. If you are unsure what happens when you do release one, see our guide on what happens to your rankings when you lose a domain.
07 / NOTE
Plan the consolidation in phases, not all at once.
Do not consolidate five domains in a single weekend. Migrate one secondary domain at a time, with at least two to four weeks between each migration. This gives Google time to process each set of redirects and lets you isolate any problems to a specific domain move.
Start with the domain that has the fewest backlinks and the least traffic. This is your test run. If anything goes wrong, the impact is minimal and you learn what to watch for on the bigger migrations. Save the domain with the most backlinks and traffic for last, when you have refined your process.
If you are also considering whether to stay on .com.au at all, our guide on moving from .com.au to .com covers the trade-offs. And if you need help choosing between domain options or planning the migration sequence, book a consultation and we can build a consolidation plan tailored to your portfolio.