Rebranding & Minimizing SEO impact
-
Hello everyone,
One of my clients is undergoing a major rebrand, which will require some substantial changes to their domain / URL structure. Primarily, we're going to:
- Move from a high-ish DA site to a low DA site
- Change the subdomain URL structure (more on that below)
- Update the content (copy, design, structure) on www. site to match the new brand
- The content on the subdomains should remain the same
- 301 redirect all pages from old site to new site where applicable
The current site architecture makes great use of subdomains, which are also going to be changing in terms of name. So, we're moving from oldsubdomain.olddomain.com to newsubdomain.newdomain.com (and not oldsubdomian.olddomain.com to oldsubdomain.olddomain.com). The content / structure of these pages is going to change minimally.
We understand that we're going to take an SEO hit overall, but are there things we can do to minimize this hit? Anyway we can 'estimate' the hit? Anyway we can educate our client to as to what to expect beyond (it is going to be bad…).
Please let me know.
Thanks!
-
I can understand your situation Josh..!!
But, as per my opinion, You should show the clear picture to your client. Be frank with your client. Tell him statistics that If we do this kind of things then it will be resulted in this.
Make your client aware about how big changes you are going to do. OR You can give recent example of Moz.com. They have done something similar things. They have made 301 redirects for all seomoz.com URLs on Moz.com. You can see its current PR and DA and all kind of things. So, Collect such data and show your client the realistic view.
-
Hi Josh,
I'm doing a similar thing - not exactly the same as we are merging 2 websites into one and then just for the fun of it putting the whole lot onto a new domain...
We've not done this yet as our new site is being built. Anyway, I found this webinar really useful: http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition and this blog post: http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons
I hope they help!
All the best,
Amelia
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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.
Related Questions
-
What is the best SEO friendly way to combine two websites.
I have two websites, eg: widgets.com - sells expensive widgets as gifts everydaywidgets.com - sells cheap widgets for everyday use. I would like to combine them both under the widgets.com domain name, because its easier to run the SEO campaign for one rather than two. But i still want two different product collections, and two different sites. widgets.com is by far the larger of the two sites so my current thought is to have that the main landing site, and have a button at the top to take the user to widgets.com/everydaywidgets where they have a similar but different site, and different products. I can set this all up no problem with the correct 301 redirects from everydaywidgets.com, but is it SEO friendly? Does anyone know of a real world example of a business doing this? Cheers
Branding | | SEOhmygod0 -
Ecommerce & Outreach
Hey, Does anyone have any advice on how to approach outreach for an ecommerce site? We're in the process of doing user guides, for niche products. I wondered if this was a good angle to approach relevant communities/sites. Or is this too time consuming for little value at the end? Is it PR outreach we should look to focus on? Thank you 🙂
Branding | | BeckyKey0 -
Enhancing SEO Between WordPress Blog and Company Website
My company has recently launched a new and improved website within the last couple months. Unfortunately, the web developers that we'd hired to build and create the site work very little with SEO, thus leaving me in the dark on where to direct any questions regarding the optimization of our web content. Along with the new website design, we've also rolled out a WordPress blog related to our firm. We do have the blog embedded onto a page of our website, and clicking on any title will redirect the viewer to our WordPress blog, hosted separately from our website. My question is this--how do you suggest I drive viewers from our blog to our website, rather than vice versa? Are there any applications, widgets, etc that you could recommend that would help me better associate the blog with our company? Any advice would help. Thanks!
Branding | | LMcLaughlin0 -
Should I remove our videos from DotSub.com to try & boost our Wistia videos?
Okay all you video SEO lovers, I had a thought today that I thought would make an interesting question. I have been using the tools at DotSub.com to transcribe our videos. The tools are great, and even better, free. We have about 80 videos on DotSub and all of these videos are also on our YouTube channel. Once I've completed the transcription, I've been exporting the .srt file and uploading them to YouTube to replace the God-awful machine transcriptions (sorry Google, but they are baaaadddd). Anyway, sometimes our DotSub video will outrank the same YouTube video, sometimes not. The 80 videos on DotSub have amassed about 10,000 views and a couple of translations...which is nice, I guess? Recently, we've begun experimenting with Wistia. Here is a search term for which our YouTube and DotSub video results pretty much flood page 1: "studiolive webinar" All of the DotSub videos also exist as Wistia videos on our Website and blog. For obvious reasons, we would rather have our Wistia videos rank in those three positions which right now are dominated by the DotSub versions. Should I remove the content from DotSub in order to try to get the Wistia videos to rank instead? Or should I leave them all there? I should probably add that we do have Wistia videos that are outranking both Dotsub and Youtube versions of the exact same videos...so I know that's possible. I'm just wondering if by leaving all of these videos up at DotSub if we are cannibalizing our potential at ranking for videos that link back to our site? What do you think?
Branding | | danatanseo0 -
What is The Time/Cost For SEO In Rebranding A Large Site
From an SEO agency perspective. What would be the estimated man hours and hard cost to rebrand a large site (1000+pages)? And all that would go into it, like 301 redirects and etc.? I have a pretty good idea, of what it would take and how perilous it could be from an SEO perspective. Because of anchor text / 301 redirects / organic potential traffic loss and etc. I just don't know the man hours and hard cost would be.
Branding | | SMG-Texas1 -
What is the impact of changing a primary .edu to a subdomain .edu?
Hello I'm looking for feedback on the impact of search rankings, overall SEO efforts and how Google will view changing example.edu to subdomain.example.edu All URLs/content under www.example.edu and example.edu would be 301 redirected to subdomain.example.edu, essentially making subdomain.example.edu the primary domain. Thank you!!
Branding | | msmcsearch0 -
E-commerce Platforms and Seo Doubts
Hello There, I plan to launch my online store with products soon via one of the saas hosted based platforms like shopify & bigcommerce. The issue is am trying out to see how this works for us. But then simultaneously we would work towards seo efforts to bring in relevant traffic too. Later once we grow and I decide to change the entire website based on custom design etc so that means again all the seo work has to be re-done? How can I avoid this since I have already invested capital and time in building the current saas hosted website and its almost ready to roll out. Can someone advice the best way forward and possibly a relevant solution Thanks Aditya
Branding | | shanky10 -
What do i do with multiple cheap domain names I want to use for SEO?
My domain registrar was having a sale for 1$ per year .com domain names (just for the first year). So I went all out and bought 16 domain names. They pretty much all are two or more keywords that i'd like to rank high on put together. We do dedicated server monitoring, so for instance I bought apachemonitoring.com and haproxymoniotring.com. Can anyone tell me what the best way would be to put these to good use technically? Options: Each domain just 301's to a specific landing page on my main company website Each domain is a site on a drupal multisite with just one page that has links to just my company website Other ideas? Thanks in advance! Walter
Branding | | walterheck0