Rebranding: How Can We Continue to Be Found by Searching the Old Name?

[Prospector-Plastics]

Our company was acquired and we are working toward an entire re-brand, including name change and new url.

We plan to appropriately 301 redirect the old site to the correct pages on the news site, etc. The question is, if users continue to search the old company name on search engines, will it appear in SERPs for the new site?

I'm guessing that our company name is associated to the old url and will that pass along the branded company name to the new url? My thoughts are to include the old company name in the sitemap.htm file and in the About Us section, particularly in the news release when the change occurs. Aside from that idea is to include social posts on G+, LinkedIn, our Blog, and Twitter as appropriate talking about the name change, all linking to the new website.

Any input would be most appreciated!

[MikeTek]

I would +1 Wiliam's answer here. 301 redirects in addition to Bing's site moving function should do the trick. Particularly if the links that point to the old domain, which will be redirected via the 301, contain your brand name - I've seen this carry the branded search rankings over regularly.

Moz has chosen to keep their home page title reading "SEOmoz is now Moz" for several months now - I don't know first-hand, but I'd imagine they've done this in part as insurance to ensure they rank for their old brand name. Might be worth considering the same.

[William.Lau]

301 redirects usually would suffice. Also I know Bing WMT has moving site function, which can help as well. And for Google WMT, I think you can make the same changes as well in there.