My client wants to rebrand their company including URL...
-
Hi all! An easy one for probably most of you. I have a client who wants to re-brand their business name and also match their URL to the new name. Their current domain name URL has been out there for over 5 years, and the site is performing quite well in search. Switching to a new URL will obviously be a very bad thing, but what are the options? newname.com redirect to the aged oldname.com, but when they are on the site, or when they find them in search, the oldname.com has nothing to do with the new brand.
Or should we 301 every page of the oldname.com site to the newname.com be good enough? What is recommended?
Thanks!
-
We recently changed our domain name to match our brand. I read everything on Google and Bing Webmaster about domain moves.
I redirected (301) each page individually to the matching new page. (Ok, we moved to WordPress from html/css and used the HTML 2 Import plugin so there was a lovely list of all the redirects for the webmaster to install on the old website)
One thing I did that was bad was made a placeholder page for the old homepage informing people of the move. I corrected that and 301'd the old home page to the new home page. I should have done that straight away.
Then I used the Site Address Change tools in Google and Bing Webmasters to notify them of the move.
Ours is a smaller site (~800 pages) and site traffic moved with it.
I'm checking links now to ask external links to update our info.
These articles helped, but there are lots more if you search for Google Webmaster domain move.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en
https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/6033102?hl=en&ref_topic=6029673
-
Just some code. To tired for branding discussion But a 302 is the sort of redirect to use when wanting to maintain PageRank on domain.old and redirect to domain.new in the same practical manner as with the 301. Difference: 302 means moved temporarily and 301 moved permanently. I would actually not advice a 302 redirect and maintaining 2 parallel domains in most cases. It doesn't solve the problem structurally and is like insulin. It keeps the patient alive and well but it doesn't cure an obsolete system running only to serve the next few lines of code and nothing else. For Apache best method for 302 redirect:
mod_rewrite method
RewriteEngine On
rewritecond %{http_host} ^yoursite.nl
rewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.newsite.nl/$1 [R=302,L]PHP method
Please lookup http://moz.com/community/q/experience-of-moving-to-a-new-domainJavaScript or other client side scripts Don not redirect with client side scripts. This is the fools choice!
Microsoft Internet Information Server and MS family See Client side scripts and you cant be a SEO if you want this. For the instructions I refer to: ~back of server disc and dial the number on it for someone who cares
!!! Watch out if you do not know what you are doing when adding rules to mod_rewrite. It is called the voodoo module by webmasters and developers for a good reason.
It's fuzzy stuff and they say it's logical as can be. It's like telling someone something really important in reverse while they answer normally or something, It's just weird and if not understood in 4 hours then you will probally never understand. Catch is that if done wrong Apache is not answering anymore for no one until undone manually. If comfortable add it to Apache httpd.conf. Alternative is putting it in .htaccess and placing this file in the document root(!) of the website which usually equates to http://website.com. Last method is sort of stupid as it simulates the vodoo box but it's not as cost effective for system resources as mod_rewrite which is the reason to want risk it in the first place.
-
You can make a redirect directly without code in apache, with the RedirectModule. The code are as simple as:
<virtualhost mydomain.com:80="">ServerName mydomain.com
RedirectPermanent / http://www.newdomain.com/
DocumentRoot /your/www/root/</virtualhost>With this apache creates a 301 for every requested page in mydomain.com to www.newdomain.com. This also can be good for using www.domain.com instead of domain.com and avoid duplicates.
But, as i've said by other people, rebranding is always a bad idea. I can recomend you to try to mantain the old URL, and make a new one for the new brand. You can try to get some SEO to the new web with links on the old, and have these webs with shigtly different content. This possible is the better idea.
-
Agree, don't rebrand, too much risk of losing traffic. Or keep the old site and create a new brand site so you have two sites, just don't tie them together in anyway. The only issue with that is it needs to be all unique content.
-
If you are using Wordpress as a CMS, it is possible to 301 on a page level per page. It is a custom field if you are using certain Wordpress frameworks, or something like Yoast SEO.
You could load the 301 redirect values into the database table via phpmyadmin or similar, but if you don't know what you are doing you can screw the whole site up, so if you don't know what I am saying, don't try it this way.
-
Don't rebrand. Would try everything to get them not to re-brand there are numerous examples where you don't get your visibility back after months / years.
Appliances Online changed to AO.com and have done a huge TV campaign in the UK, but they have never recovered there search visibility (info from Searchmetrics).
I would advise stay away from at all costs.
If the client defiantly wants to, my web designer simply put in a few lines of code onto the old domain, and if a customer types in an oldurl.com/webpage25 it redirects to newurl.com/webpage25 so that you don't have to 301 every page.
He has just left for the day, but if no one else can give the answer by the morning I will let you know how he has done it.
But my advice stay away from rebranding.
-
301 each page to the new page on the new re-branded URL. Pay particular attention to the ones getting a ton of traffic (whatever a ton looks like for that specific site). You will be better off to do that, rather than do a domain-wide 301 redirect from a number of perspectives.
Don't burn a 5 year old domain, that takes too much time and effort to just abandon it.
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
-
Consolidate URLs on Wordpress?
Hi Guys, On a WordPress site, we are working with currently has multiple different versions of each URL per page. See screenshot: https://d.pr/i/ZC8bZt Data example: https://tinyurl.com/y8suzh6c Right now the non-https version redirects to the equivalent https versions while some of the https versions don't redirect and are status code 200. We all want all of them to redirect to the highlighted blue version (row a).Is this easily doable in wordpress and how would one go about it? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickstar1 -
What is the Redirect Rule for corresponding https urls to new domain with the same https urls?
2 sites have the same urls but the owner wants just the 1 site. So I will be doing a 301 redirect with .htaccess from https://www.example.co.uk/sportsbook/SOCCER/today/ redirecting to https://www.example.com//sportsbook/SOCCER/today/ There are a lot of urls that are the same, so I was wondering what the rule is to put in the file please that will change them all to the corresponding urls? Would this be correct?... RewriteEngine on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WSIDW
RewriteCond %{HTTPS_HOST} ^example.co.uk [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS_HOST} ^www.example.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://example.com$1 [L,R=301,NC] Or would a simple rule like this work... redirect 301 / http://www.new domain.com/ If not correct could you please give me the correct rule, thanks! Then of course doing a change of address of address in webmaster tools after. Also... do I still need to do the forwarding from the https://www.example.co.uk/ domain provider after as well? Many thanks for your help in advance.0 -
Should brand/company be included in meta title?
Is there any point/benefit/requirement in using brand/company name in the meta title, I realise search engines like Google prefer brand focused pages, However it is unlikely that someone would be including the company in our search terms. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Tagged URL ranking organically
I've noticed that one of our GA tagged urls are ranking organically & therefore is skewing the referral data. The campaign that we were tracking is no longer active but the link still works, but it's going to an old landing page. I asked our developers if we could redirect it but they said that it didn't work. Does anyone have some advise or a solution for this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Elihn0 -
Uppercase in URLs = Dupe Content
Hi Mozzers, My developers recently changed a bunch of the pages I am working on into all lower case (something I know ideally should have been done in the first place). The URLs have sat for about a week as lower case without 301 redirecting the old upper-case URLs to these pages. In Google Webmaster Tools, I'm seeing Google recognize them as duplicate meta tags, title tags, etc. See image: http://screencast.com/t/KloiZMKOYfa We're 301 redirecting the old URLs to the new ones ASAP, but is there anything else I should do? Any chance Google is going to noindex these pages because it seems them as dupes until I fix them? Sometimes I can see both pages in the SERPs if I use personalized results, and it scares me: http://screencast.com/t/4BL6iOhz4py3 Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Is it worth switching from underscores to hyphens in the URL?
I work for a website that recently did a redesign, and switched from hyphens to underscores. We have seen some drop in traffic, although that may be attributed to the migration. I have read that while Google prefers hyphens, the underscore problem is not as much of an issue as it used to be. Is it worth 301'ing the page to a version of itself with hyphens instead of underscores in the URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
URL for offline use.
Hi there, We currently have a url www.example.com/health/back-pain/ We are wanting to promote this page on our product packaging however making the URL simpler www.example.com/back-pain/ is it just a case of using a 301? are there any issues here? Thanks for any feedback
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Could this URL issue be affecting our rankings?
Hi everyone, I have been building links to a site for a while now and we're struggling to get page 1 results for their desired keywords. We're wondering if a web development / URL structure issue could be to blame in what's holding it back. The way the site's been built means that there's a 'false' 1st-level in the URL structure. We're building deeplinks to the following page: www.example.com/blue-widgets/blue-widget-overview However, if you chop off the 2nd-level, you're not given a category page, it's a 404: www.example.com/blue-widgets/ - [Brings up a 404] I'm assuming the web developer built the site and URL structure this way just for the purposes of getting additional keywords in the URL. What's worse is that there is very little consistency across other products/services. Other pages/URLs include: www.example.com/green-widgets/widgets-in-green www.example.com/red-widgets/red-widget-intro-page www.example.com/yellow-widgets/yellow-widgets I'm wondering if Google is aware of these 'false' pages* and if so, if we should advise the client to change the URLs and therefore the URL structure of the website. This is bearing in mind that these pages haven't been linked to (because they don't exist) and therefore aren't being indexed by Google. I'm just wondering if Google can determine good/bad URL etiquette based on other parts of the URL, i.e. the fact that that middle bit doesn't exist. As a matter of fact, my colleague Steve asked this question on a blog post that Dr. Pete had written. Here's a link to Steve's comment - there are 2 replies below, one of which argues that this has no implication whatsoever. However, 5 months on, it's still an issue for us so it has me wondering... Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gmorgan0