Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Michael,

My gut would agree. It should be looked at in context and thanks for confirming that for me.

Doesn't help when clients look at the tool though.

Sorry but how does this response help? You've just explained how the tool works which we already kinda know. I want to know how to resolve the issue or if it can be ignored.

Thanks Nick,

We're happy to mention the old brand on the new site and will be talking about the rebrand on the new site.

Agree leaving the old brand in the meta title for some time will help. We're also planning on mentioning old and new brands in the meta description so users can easily see we are the same company.

Thanks Egol,

Google forgetting our old brand over time is what we thought might happen.

The amount of brand traffic we have is indeed significant and we want to retain as much of it as poss. I know there's more to be had with the rebrand but that's an unknown quantity and not concrete enough to not worry about old brand traffic.

We're in the UK and the old brand will be the parent company. Plus we're a limited company so we're required by law to say something like "blah services ltd trading as foo services" on our site.

So we can add something along the lines of "Copyright blah services ltd trading as foo services all rights reserved" in the footer of all pages.

And we'll host a PR about the rebrand on our blog and mention the history in our About page.

But to clarify, can we assume that over time traffic for the old brand will diminish.. particularly if we don't mention the old brand on the new site? Just want to manage expectations.

Hi Egol,

Yes the new website will be a big improvement on usability and we'll be doing lots of great PR to get the new name out there and we're excited about all the new traffic and increased engagement that will bring.

However, current branded traffic accounts for a significant chunk of revenue and we don't want to lose this traffic if possible

So will Google still return our new domain for searches related to our old brand?

Or should we right off traffic for our old brand and focus on new traffic for the new brand?

@Moosa

We accept there might be a temporary traffic dip but we're ok with that if traffic returns back to previous levels after google has picked up the domain change.

Can we still expect to get traffic for our old brand once things have settled though?

The PPC is more about bidding on our old brand keywords so we still retain some of that traffic. The PR is for raising awareness for our new brand and will bring lots of lovely new traffic, hopefully.

But ultimately we want to retain the traffic for our old brand while generating new traffic for our new brand

Is that too greedy?

Hi,

How would you retain the organic search traffic for your old brand after a full rebrand? Website redesign, new company name, new domain name etc

If we change from blahservices.com to fooservices.com and do all the things you would for a regular domain migration, will Google still return pages from the new brand fooservices.com when a user searches for old brand "blah services keyword"?

We will be doing the following to try and not lose organic search traffic for our old brand:

Keep PPC running on our old brand name keywords
Mention our old brand on the new website in the footer i.e. "Copyright blah services trading as foo services"
Publish a press release about the rebrand on our blog
Say something like "blah services has rebranded as foo services" in meta descriptions for a while
Put old and new brands in meta title for a while
Keep 301 redirects from old domain in place forever

Is there anything else you would add to that?

Thanks,

K

Sorry if i'm being dumb but all i saw in slide 31 is an image of a Google blog search

I don't see the link acquisition assistant there. Just the competitive link finder

Another point I was considering...

If Google only counts click backs to the results as a bounce does that mean bounces caused by external link clicks are ignored in the ranking factor?

For instance, say you have an affiliate site where the bounce rate is high because people are clicking your affiliate links and leaving your site. This would be a good thing if you're an affiliate.

But you look at your analytics and see the bounce rate is high and start to panic thinking that google will demote you for having a high bounce rate.

But in actual fact Google is only looking at the rate at which users return back to the serps which might not be high at all, and ignoring those external link clicks which are causing a high bounce rate in analytics.

And therefore you needn't worry about your high analytics bounce rate.

I guess it's the type of bounce that counts when it comes to google rankings

Isn't analytics bounce rate ignored by Google with regards to rankings?

Isn't it the rate at which visitors return back to the search results that Google looks at?

No amount of analytics manipulation will change that. Only usability..