Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI
      Moz Local

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Changing Brand and Domain Name - SEO Impacts

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Changing Brand and Domain Name - SEO Impacts

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4
    5
    3573
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • piazza
      piazza Subscriber last edited by

      Hi everyone

      I'm hoping a few of you can help me out...

      We're an online-one retailer and we're currently looking at rebranding.
      This is for commercial reasons:

      • Our current name is difficult for customers to spell
      • It's not wholly representative of what we now offer
      • We want to push offline and social marketing to help increase or DA

      In a nutshell, our current name implies 'cheap' and we're moving more upmarket.
      Our DA is only 10, and a re-brand will make our brand more marketable.
      A stronger brand and DA will help us climb up the rankings quickly - last year we ranked no 1 for a relatively competitive term before dropping a few places.

      In terms of current traffic:

      • 30% is via SEO (we have a low DA but rank ok for certain phrases)
      • 70% is via adwords

      We had our website redesigned last year and it performs well. 
      The idea is to have a new brand logo and colours and move to a new domain.
      We will keep all our existing products and content.

      Please could anyone let me know the implications of this move?
      What are potential pitfalls, and what will we need to do to alert Google?
      I have read about 301 redirects, would these be required?

      As always, any help is very much appreciated.

      Many thanks

      Abs

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • varun1800
        varun1800 last edited by

        Hi Abs,

        Changing brand and domain name are very crucial steps, so it requires proper attention and good strategy prior to the implementation. These changes can have the serious impact on the SEO work and branding you have ever done.

        Below is the list of recommendation that you should follow:

        1. Redirect all the old website URLs to the relevant URLs of the new website

        2. Keep a close eye on Google webmaster to analyze and fix 404 errors

        3. If you have subdomains linking to old website, redirect them to the new domain

        4. Setup sitemap for your new domain

        5. Do press release for your new brand so that visitors can know about the change

        6. Perform Google Adwords for rebranding message like We have shifted to a new brand.

        After following above steps, keep analysing your website to check the impact of domain change and rebranding on your website. So that you can fix the problems as soon as possible.

        The real example of rebranding is Odesk, which has become Upwork now. You can get the detailed information of my mentioned point in the below link:

        http://searchengineland.com/odesk-upwork-migrate-domain-not-kill-seo-223494

        Hope this will help.

        Regards,
        Varun

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • piazza
          piazza Subscriber @Bigb06 last edited by

          Hi Nicolas,

          Thanks for your response. 
          I'll read it in conjunction with any other posts and if I have any questions I'll be sure to come back to you!

          Abs

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Bryggselv.no
            Bryggselv.no last edited by

            Seems like there's a double post here, so I'll copy my answer from the other:


            Ok, so a few years ago, I helped a multinational/multidomain corporation with a massive restructuring of their IA and domain portfolio (a total of 21 websites in 15 languages).

            You can read all about it here https://moz.com/blog/restructuring-your-website-and-how-to-minimize-traffic-loss

            In short, what you wanna do is:

            1. Create XML sitemap for old website
            2. 301 each individual page from Old Domain to exactly or closest corresponding page on New Domain
            3. Ping search engines from the old site with the old XML sitemap, so that they may as quickly as possible discover the move
            4. Keep a close eye on Google Webmaster Tools for crawl/error messages and indexation issues
            5. Track # of indexed pages on Old and New domain
            6. Submit new XML sitemap from New Domain 2 weeks after launch
            7. Also consider identifying your most important links via OSE or Majestic, and ask owners to update their links to the new domain.

            Hope this helps 🙂

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • Bigb06
              Bigb06 last edited by

              You must carefully prepare the migration :

              • 301 all old urls to new ones, for example with htacess. To be sure, you can crawl your website for example with Xenu, and then test if all urls have been correctly redirected
              • redirect email boxes
              • list your top links with opensiteplorer and ask webmasters to change the links url
              piazza 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              Browse Questions

              Explore more categories

              • Moz Tools

                Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

              • SEO Tactics

                Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

              • Community

                Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

              • Digital Marketing

                Chat about tactics outside of SEO

              • Research & Trends

                Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

              • Support

                Connect on product support and feature requests.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • VeteransFirstMarketing

                SEO impact of 301 redirects based on IP addresses from a specific state

                Hello Moz Community! We are facing an issue that may or may not be unique, but need some advice and/or clarification on the best way to address the issue. We recently rebranded and launched a new site under a new domain and things have been progressing well.  However, despite all the up front legwork on trademarks and licensing, we have recently encountered a hiccup that forces us to revert to the old URL/branding for one specific state.  This may be a temporary issue that lasts a couple of months or it could potentially be in the court system for a couple of years. One potential solution we have discussed is to redirect the new site to the old site based on IP addresses for the state in question.  Looking for any guidance on what type of impact this may have on SEO.  Also open to any other suggestions or guidance on dealing with this situation. Thanks

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VeteransFirstMarketing
                0
              • kvivek05

                SEO Impact of External links in JS tag

                We have our JS tag and iframe tag being used over by 100 leading websites. What would be the SEO impact if we added a follow link in the iframe. Would it have any negative impact ? Vivek

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kvivek05
                0
              • HashtagHustler

                How much does dirty html/css etc impact SEO?

                Good Morning! I have been trying to clean up this website and  half the time I can't even edit our content without breaking the WYSIWYG Editor. Which leads me to the next question. How much, if at all, is this impacting our SEO. To my knowledge this isn't directly causing any broken pages for the viewer, but still, it certainly concerns me. I found this post on Moz from last year: http://moz.com/community/q/how-much-impact-does-bad-html-coding-really-have-on-seo We have a slightly different set of code problems but still wanted to revisit this question and see if anything has changed. I also can't imagine that all this broken/extra code is helping our page load properly. Thanks everybody!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler
                0
              • Seeders

                Combine .com and .co.uk domain? So forward .co.uk to .com for SEO?

                Hello, A new client of mine has an .com and an .co.uk domain. Both the same content (and they don't have the capacity to make specific content on both domains). I am thinking building al domain authority to 1 domain. In this case the .com domain. 
                And forward the .co.uk to this .com domain.
                In this way, the .com will rank in both UK as in other English speaking countries, right? Or not?
                Or should I use the  rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag? I am not sure. But I do know big brands rank high in the Netherlands with .com domains (for example booking.com). Looking forward on feedback on best practices here... Thanks!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seeders
                0
              • unibiz

                Domain Alias SEO

                We have 5 domain alias of our existing sites
                All 5 domain alias are domain alias of our main site. It means, all domain alias will have exactly same site and contents
                Like Main domain: www.mywebsite.com
                DomainAlias: www.myproduct.com,  www.myproduct2.com,  www.myproduc3.com
                And if anybody will open our site www.myproduct.com, it will open same website which I have in primary site what can i do to rank all website without any penalty....i s there any way? This is domain alias of in hosting industry Thanks

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unibiz
                0
              • knielsen

                SEO value in multiple backlinks from same domain and from various sub-domains.

                A site has a link to my site as one of their main tabs, which means whenever a user clicks through to another page within the site, my link - being a main tab - is there. This creates thousands of links from this site. How does Google treat this? Do we have a rough formula estimate. In other words, assume it creates 1,000 backlinks would the SEO value be around the same as if I had just 2 link total as a main tab, but on 2 different non-related sites? Or, does it actually count fully as 1,000 links? Links from various sub-domains. Several .EDU's are linking to my site. Different schools within the overall same university. Example: nursing.abc.edu links to my site, but so does business.abc.edu. For SEO does that count as much as if I had links from complete non-related universities, or would Google evaluate that these links are related (since same main domain) and that will discount any links more than 1 to some extent? If discounted, then what do we estimate the discount to be? thank yoyu

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen
                1
              • Positec

                How do 302 redirects from Akamai content targeting impact SEO?

                How do 302 redirects from Akamai content targeting impact SEO? I'm using Akamai content targeting to get people from countries and languages to the right place (eg www.abc.123 to redirect to www.abc.123/NL-nl/default.aspx where folks from the Netherlands get their localized site in dutch) and from the edge server closest to them.  As far as I know Akamai doesn't allow me to use anything but a 302.  Anyone run across this?  is this 302 a problem?  I did a fetch as googlebot on my main domain and all I see is the Akamai 302.  I can't imagine this is the first time Akamai has run across this but I would like to know for sure.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Positec
                0
              • Cordstrap

                Is it worth switching from .net to .com if you own both domain names

                For over 20 years the company I work for has used www.company.net as their TLD, because we could not register www.company.com at that time. However, currently we also own www.company.com www.company.com has a 301 re-direct to www.company.net  We are a global company, and market leader in our industry. Our company name is associated with the product we make, and our competitors use our company name as their targeted keywords to attract visitors to their sites because our company name is synonym with the product we and they make. As we are a global company we also have lots of TLDcc's. The email address of all our employees worldwide have a .net email address extension. Would you advice switching from www.company.net to www.company.com??? And if so, what would be the reasons for this switch. Would it only be for branding purposes? Looking forward to some insights before taking on such an invasive switch (because of the switch of all email addresses of employees worldwide). Best regards, Astrid Groeneveld

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cordstrap
                0

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.