Rebranding & Minimizing SEO impact

[10SL]

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!

[CommercePundit]

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.

[CommT]

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