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 reputation grow with Reviews AI
      Moz Local

      Let your reputation grow with Reviews 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
    3587
    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

              • anagentile

                Redirection of 100 domain to Main domain affects SEO?

                domain seo redirecting domain

                Hi guys, An email software vendor managed by a different area of my company redirected 100 domains used for unsolicited email campaigns to my main domain. These domains are very likely to get blacklisted at some point. My SEO tool now is showing me all those domains as "linking" to my main site as do-follow links. The vendor states that this will not affect my main domain/website in any way. I'm highly concerned. I would appreciate your professional opinion about this. Thanks!!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anagentile
                0
              • Saba.Elahi.M.

                When creating a sub-domain, does that sub-domain automatically start with the DA of the main domain?

                We have a website with a high DA and we are considering sub-folder or sub-domain. One of the great benefits of a sub-folder is that we know we get to keep the high DA, is this also the case for sub-domains? Also if you could provide any sources of information that specify this, I can't see to find anything!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Saba.Elahi.M.
                0
              • Magne_Vidnes

                SEO implications of moving fra a sub-folder to a root domain

                I am considering a restructure of my site, and was hoping for some input on SEO implications which I am having some issues getting clarity in. (I will be using sample domains/urls because of language reasons, not an english site), Thinking about moving a site (all content) from example.com/parenting -> parenting.com. This is to have a site fully devoted to this theme, and more easily monitor and improve SEO performance on this content alone. Today all stats on external links, DA etc is related to the root domain, and not just this sub-department. Plus it would be a better brand-experience of the content and site. Other info/issues: -The domain parenting.com (used as example) is currently redirected to example.com/parenting. So I would have to reverse that redirect, and would also redirect all articles to the new site. The current domain example.com has a high DA (67), but the new domain parenting.com has a much lower DA  (24). Question: Would the parenting.com domain improve it's DA when not redirected and the sub-folder on the high-DA domain is redirected here instead? Would it severly hurt SEO traffic to make this change, and if so is there a strategy to make the move with as little loss in traffic as possible? How much value is in having a stand-alone domain, which also is one of the most important keywords for this theme? My doubt comes mostly from moving from a domain with high DA to a domain with much lower DA, and I am not sure about how removing the redirect would change that, or if placing a new redirect from the subfolder on the current site would help improve it. Would some DA flow over with a 301 redirect? Thanks for any advice or hints to other documentation that might be of interest for this scenario 🙂

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Magne_Vidnes
                0
              • vtmoz

                Linking from & to in domains and sub-domains

                What's the best optimised linking between sub-domains and domains? And every time we'll give website link at top with logo...do we need to link sub-domain also with all it's pages? If example.com is domain and example.com/blog is sub-domain or sub-folder... Do we need to link to example.com from /blog? Do we need to give /blog link in all pages of /blog? Is there any difference in connecting domains with sub-domains and sub-folders?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz
                0
              • CFCU

                Having 2 brands with the same content - will this work from an SEO perspective

                Hi All, I would love if someone could help and provide some insights on this.  We're a financial institution and have a set of products that we offer. We have recently joined with another brand and will now be offering all our products to their customers. What we are looking to do is have 1 site that masks the content for both sites so it appears as there are 2 seperate brands with different content - in fact we have a main site and then a sister brand that offers the same products. Is there anyway to do this so when someone searches for Credit Card from Brand A it is indexed under Brand A and same when someone searched for Credit Card from Brand B it is indexed under Brand B. The one thing is we would not want to rel:can the pages nor be penalised by googles latest PR algorithm. Hope someone can help! Thanks Dave

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFCU
                1
              • 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
              • mdmoz

                Changing my pages URL name - HELP NEEDED FAST

                Hello, I need to change the URL name for a few pages on my site. The site was launched just recently, so it has no obvious ranking and traffic. My question is, what is the best practice for changing/deleting the page name? after deleting the page, should I go to Google webmaster tool and use URL Removal and remove the old page? I know that I have to also create a new XML sitemap file, but not sure about the old pages in google search result Thanks!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mdmoz
                0
              • Colage

                Multiple stores & domains vs. One unified store (SEO pros / cons for E-Commerce)

                Our company runs a number of individual online shops, specialised in particular products but all in the same genre of goods overall, with a specific and relevant domain name for each shop. At the moment the sites are separate, and not interlinked, i.e. Completely separate brands. An analogy could be something like clothing accessories (we are not in the clothing business): scarves.com, and silkties.com (our field is more niche than this) We are about to launch a related site, (e.g. handbags.com), in the same field again but without precisely overlapping products. We will produce this site on a newer, more flexible e-commerce platform, so now is a good time to consider whether we want to place all our sites together with one e-commerce system on the backend. Essentially, we need to know what the pros and cons would be of the various options facing us and how the SEO ranking is affected by the three possibilities. Option 1: continue with separate sites each with its own domains. Option 2: have multiple sites, each on their own domain, but on the same ecommerce system and visible linked together for the customer (with unified checkout) – on the top of each site could be a menu bar linking to each site: [Scarves.com] – [SilkTies.com] – [Handbags.com] The main question here is whether the multiple domains are mutually beneficial, particularly considerding how close to target keywords the individual domains are. If mutually benefitial, how does it compare to option 3: Option 3: Having recently acquired a domain name (e.g. accessories.com) which would cover the whole category together, we are presented with a third option: making one site selling all of these products in different categories. Our main concern here would be losing the ability to specifically target marketing, and losing the benefit of the domains with the key words in for what people are more likely to be searching for (e.g. 'silk tie') rather than 'accessories.' Is it worth taking the hit on losing these specific targeted domain names for the advantage of increased combined inbound links?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colage
                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
              • Digital Marketers
              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.