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
-
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
-
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:
-
Redirect all the old website URLs to the relevant URLs of the new website
-
Keep a close eye on Google webmaster to analyze and fix 404 errors
-
If you have subdomains linking to old website, redirect them to the new domain
-
Setup sitemap for your new domain
-
Do press release for your new brand so that visitors can know about the change
-
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 -
-
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
-
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:
- Create XML sitemap for old website
- 301 each individual page from Old Domain to exactly or closest corresponding page on New Domain
- Ping search engines from the old site with the old XML sitemap, so that they may as quickly as possible discover the move
- Keep a close eye on Google Webmaster Tools for crawl/error messages and indexation issues
- Track # of indexed pages on Old and New domain
- Submit new XML sitemap from New Domain 2 weeks after launch
- 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
-
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
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
-
Does changing template for a wordpress site affect SEO
Hi I work for an Inventory Management Software company and we already have a WordPress site but I am currently working on re-designing of our WordPress site and in this process, we are looking for moving to a new template. I want to know what will be the impact on SEO performance while taking a shift to a new template.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cin7_Marketing0 -
Do I need to put the company name in the SEO Title box in Yoast?
I am optimizing Title Tags for a WP site. I am getting ready to add keywords to the Yoast SEO. I noticed the long company name is currently the Title Tag - I choose 2-3 keyword phases per page- what do I do with the long business name? In my own site I can post up 70 characters of keywords in the Title box and my company name appears after a pipe in the browser with my the keywords ahead of it? As Follow on my Site: Title, Tilte, Title - Company Name. Thank you! Joe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joseph.Lusso1 -
What are the pros & cons of recycling an old domain name?
Hi, Old domain name is about books and book buyback. It had about 1000 pages at one time, been around since 2006, and still shows in Open Site Explorer as 86 links from from 46 domains, PA 43 DA 35, spam score of 4. The 4 evidently relates to low number of internal links and no contact info. The domain name's ownership hasn't changed, but for the last year has either not been up at all or only the homepage in the last couple of months. Now the idea is to maybe re-purpose it for place rating content... no more book content... totally different subject matter. Is this an organic search advantage or would it be better to start fresh with a new domain name? Is Google going to have a harder time seeing it as relevant for a new subject (with good new content) or seeing a new site as important? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
"sex" in non-adult domain name
I have a client with a domain that has "sex" in the domain name. For example, electronicsexpo.com. The domain ranks for a few keywords related to the services offered. It is an old domain that has been online for over 10 years. It ranks well for local keywords. No real SEO effort has been made on this domain, so it is rather a clean slate. I am going to be doing SEO on this site. Will the fact that the word "sex" exists in the name have any sort of negative consequence. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING adult related or pornographic on this site. I would think that search engines are sophisticated enough to differentiate, but would potential customers with things like parental filters be blocked from viewing content? Is this hurtful in anyway? If so, would I be better off changing domain names? TIA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Community inside the domain or in a separate domain
Hi there, I work for an ecommerce company as an online marketing consultant. They make kitchenware, microware and so on. The are reviewing their overall strategy and as such they want to build up a community. Ideally, they would want to have the community in a separate domain. This domain wouldn't have the logo of the brand. This community wouldn't promote the brand itself. The brand would post content occassionally and link the store domain. The reasoning of this approach is to not interfere in the way of the community users and also the fact that the branded traffic acquired doesn't end up buying at the store I like this approach but I am concerned because the brand is not that big to have two domains separated and lose all the authority associated with one strong domain. I would definitely have everything under the same domain, store and community, otherwise we would have to acquire traffic for two domains. 1. What do you think of both scenarios, one domain versus two? Which one is better? 2. Do you know any examples of ecommerce companies with successful communities within the store domain? Thanks and regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | footd0 -
Best practice for duplicate website content: same root domain name but different extension
Hi there I have a new client who has two websites: http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.co.nz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | turnbullholdingsltd
http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.org.nz They are the same in every regard apart from the domain extension (.co.nz & .org.nz) which is likely to be causing them issues with Google ranking given the huge amount of duplicate content. What is the best practice approach to fixing this? Normally, if I was starting from scratch, I would set one of the extensions as an alias which redirects to the main domain. Thanks in advance. Laurie0 -
Redirect ruined domain to new domain without passing link juice
A new client has a domain which has been hammered by bad links, updates etc and it's basically on its arse because of previous SEO guys. They have various domains for their business (brand.com, brand.co.uk) and want to use a fresh domain and take it from there. Their current domain is brand.com (the ruined one). They're not bothered about the rankings for brand.com but they want to redirect brand.com to brand.co.uk so that previous clients can find them easily. Would a 302 redirect work for this? I don't want to set up a 301 redirect as I don't want any of the crappy links pointing across. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
Is it safe to 301 redirect old domain to new domain after a manual unnatural links penalty?
I have recently taken on a client that has been manually penalised for spammy link building by two previous SEOs. Having just read this excellent discussion, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience I am weighing up the odds of whether it's better to cut losses and recommend moving domains. I had thought under these circumstances it was important not to 301 the old domain to the new domain but the author (Lewis Sellers) comments on 3/4/13 that he is aware of forwards having been implemented without transferring the penalty to the new domain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience#jtc216689 Is it safe to 301? What's the latest thinking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ewan.Kennedy0