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
-
Will switching my domain cause SEO suicide?
Hi, Community! Had a client for many years, MN Plumbing & Appliance Installation: mnplumbingandappliance.com We're re-branding as MN Plumbing & Home Services. We're wanting to change the domain to:mnplumbingandhomeservices.com Problem is, we have some 20+ great backlinks, a DA of 46 (pretty good for us), and a domain age of over 10 years! Will switching this domain cause SEO suicide?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Quistdesigns0 -
Moved brand's shop to a new domain. will our organic traffic recuperate?
Hello, We are a healthcare company with a strong domain authority and several thousand pages of service related content at brand.com. We've been operating an ancillary ecommerce store that sells related 3rd party products at brand.com/shop for a little over a year. We recently invested in a platform upgrade and moved our site to a new domain, brandshop.com. We implemented page-level 301 redirects including all category pages, product detail pages, canonical and non-canonical URLs, etc.. which the understanding that there would not be any loss in page rank. What we're seeing over the last 2 months is an initial dive in organic traffic, followed by a ramp-up period of if impressions (but not position) in the following weeks, another drop and we've steady at this low for the last 2 weeks. Another area that might have hurt us, the 301 redirects were implemented correctly immediately post launch (on a wednesday), but it was discovered on the following Monday that our .htaccess file had reverted to an old version without the redirect rules. For 3-4 days, all traffic was being redirected from brand.com/shop/url to brandshop.com/badurl. Can we expect to recover our organic traffic giving the launch screw up with the .htaccess file, or is it more of an issue with us separating from the brand.com domain? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eugene_p
Eugene0 -
Using Webmaster Tools to Redirect Domain to Specific Page on Another Domain
Hey Everyone, we redirected an entire domain to a specific URL on another domain (not the homepage). We used a 301 Redirect, but I'm also wondering if I should use the Google Webmaster Tools "Change of Address" section to redirect. There is no option to redirect the old domain to the specific URL on the new domain within the "Change of Address" section. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Suggestions for a cost effective, SEO safe domain that was previously penalised
Hi, I will try to explain my situation as clearly as I can, and any positive advise would be greatly appreciated. Obviously please let me know if you have any questions but I'm sorry the domains are private. I started by business 4 years ago and launched a website (site A) and worked hard to promote it in the best way I knew how. It brought in a good income for around 3 years but then was hit with some sort of google penalty/filter! Knowing then what I know now would probably of avoided the problem altogether but that's another story... So I brought another domain (site B) and started again with a new design and completely re-branded the company, and again have been working hard to promote it. It has been preforming well and there has been steady progress 😉 However since then I have been steadily promoting the penalised site (site A) and keeping an eye on it to see if the penalty/filter may be lifted. It had initially lost around 75% of traffic, but recently has been doing much better in SERPS and is again on the increase. My problem is that with my company now being completely re branded I want to keep consistency but (site A) looks old and dated compared the new one (site B) and I don’t want to be confusing users etc... So I need a cost efficient and “safe” solution to this in terms of SEO and budget. 301 Redirect to site B I thought of a 301 redirect “BUT” I'm concerned about the penalty/filter being passed onto the new site (site B) and have read this dose happen ? Complete Redesign/brand for site A This would probably be the best option except I'm limited on funds. I would need “another” full commerce site as its just way to much money at the moment. Remove site A completely Funds are tight and I'm still feeling the affects of the penalty so really can't afford to loose any traffic at all! Use site A as a micro-site I thought a micro site with just the main product landing pages being used. I would use the same design as site B, then re-write the text and then link everything to the new site. “BUT” I'm concerned about getting another penalty (duplicate) as all the anchor text links going to site B site would be identical! EG. To use the same design as site B I would need to use the same layout etc including navbars, anchor text links in the footer etc.. and I'm worried this may trigger a duplicate content penalty ? I hope there are some suggestion for my situation and thanks in advance for your help. Thanks Chris.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | doorguy880 -
How does a competing website with clearly black hat style SEO tactics, have a far higher domain authority than our website that only uses legitimate link building tactics?
Through SEO Moz link analysis tools, we looked at a competing websites external followed links and discovered a large number of links going to Blog pages with domain authorities in the 90's (their blog page authorities were between 40 and 60), however the single blog post written by this website was exactly the same in every instance and had been posted in August 2011. Some of these blog sites had 160 or so links linking back to this competing website whose domain authority is 49 while ours is 28, their Moz Trust is 5.43 while ours is 5.18. An example of some of the blogs that link to the competing website are: http://advocacy.mit.edu/coulter/blog/?p=13 http://pest-control-termite-inspection.posterous.com/\ However many of these links are "no follow" and yet still show up on Open Site Explorer as some of this competing websites top linking pages. Admittedly, they have 584 linking root domains while we have only 35, but if most of them are the kind of websites posted above, we don't understand how Google is rewarding them with a higher domain authority. Our website is www.anteater.com.au Are these tactics now the only way to get ahead?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter.Huxley590 -
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 | | Colage0 -
Registry changes: Negative impact on organic rankings?
A client's site ranks very well for extremely competitive terms. The google rankings have been stable for over a year. There has been an organizational shake up, and the 'registrant' and administrative/billing/technical contact info needs to be updated, including the physical address. I have been hesitant to modify the information for risk of a negative impact on the rankings. Will changes to the registrant/contacts/address info at the registrar have a negative impact on current organic rankings? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seagreen
Greg0 -
Domain certificate
Hello, I would like to know if there is any certificate we can buy to increase the Seo of my website. Thanks very much for your time
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cartageno0