How to best migrate / rebrand our organisation without losing the SEO on our current website?
-
I searched the current questions and found similar questions but nothing as specific as what I wanted, so...
We are a graphic design school in Melbourne Australia. We have a website - www.graphicschool.com.au - that ranks fairly well in Google for our particular search terms. We have rebranded the organisation and want to change the website domain name to the new branding - www.grenadi.vic.edu.au - but obviously do not want to lose our hard earned SEO and rankings. We only have two strategies so far, and are not sure what the pros and cons to either strategy are, or whether there is a better way.
The two ideas we have are:
Option 1) Just swap the domain name.
We were thinking about swapping the domain name and setting up 301 redirects to tell Google that the old page that ranked well is now this page 'x' on the new site. I've read that you lose all your valuable links doing this because they are domain specific and the 301 doesn't forward your links.
Option 2) Build a second website.
This idea is that we would build a second website with our new domain name and branding and build up that site until it ranks as highly as the first site and then start to remove the first site. We're planning on completely redeveloping the current website anyway and changing and adding lots more content as well so this option is not out of the question.
Any help, thoughts, suggestions or further options would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to discuss.
Can I also please suggest that a new category is added under 'The SEO Process' - something like 'rebranding / migration'
Cheers,
Anthony
-
For #1, your approach is solid.
For #2, the waiting period length is dependent upon how quickly your entire site is updated in Google. This time period varies based on the size of your size, how deep some content is within your site, the popularity of your site's pages, and other factors.
Post migration you want to confirm the 301 is working, ensure your pages are canonicalized correctly, then submit an updated sitemap to Google and Bing.
Presently your Google SERP should show the links to your existing domain. After the migration, your most popular pages should show the links to the new domain within a day or so. It would not be unusual for it to take several weeks for all your pages to be updated. I would recommend waiting to make changes until after the majority of the site's pages had their URLs updated in SERP. That is the best measure that the migration has gone smoothly.
Post migration, you can then make any desired changes to the site and track the results from those changes without wondering about worrying about the migration contaminating your results.
For site-wide changes, you can start off with adjusting a few pages and see how your results are impacting before applying the change to your entire site.
The campaign tool is wonderful. Look at the tutorial and learn everything you can about it. It can help you measure and track your site's SEO performance.
-
Hi Ryan (and others),
Thanks for your answer it was very helpful. So the following strategy would suit:
-
Swap domain name and put a single 301 redirect on the entire old domain name to go to the new domain name, which would work because all the pages would be the same.
-
Once I waited a while and had decent stats on the redirect I could then start to make changes to the pages on the site and keep an eye on their rank. Would you do this on an individual page by page basis or build out new content for the existing pages offline then update the whole site at once?
Lastly, what are the best tools for evaluating and analysing pre and post migration SEO of the site? At the moment I only have Google Analytics... is there something more comprehensive that is SEO specific that I should be watching it with. I've never used the SEOmoz campaign toolset (only signed up this week) so I don't know how it works, or even what it does - is that the best thing to use?
Thanks again,
Anthony
-
-
I've read that you lose all your valuable links doing this because they are domain specific and the 301 doesn't forward your links.
If you do the 301 redirect properly most of the link value will be preserved.
I would do Option 1.
-
I would recommend following Option 1.
Take your existing site exactly as-is, and change to the new URL. Then use a single 301 to redirect traffic to the new site.
I would suggest not making any improvements to your site until you see all of your pages listed in SERPs with their new URLs. You may be tempted to make adjustments, but it will make tracking improvements harder to measure.
-
"I've read that you lose all your valuable links doing this because they are domain specific and the 301 doesn't forward your links."
Where did you read this? It's entirely incorrect. A 301 redirect will credit 90-99% of your link juice as well as all users and bots. The best approach here is to setup your .com.au domain branded and setup the way you want, then 301 all your old pages to the most relevant ones on the new domain. You will maintain the vast majority of your link juice this way and get to use the brand/domain you want.
More information on 301 redirects
Good luck!
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
-
What are best page titles for sub-folders or sub-directories? Same as website?
Hi all, We always mention "brand & keyword" in every page title along with topic in the website, like "Topic | vertigo tiles". Let's say there is a sub-directory with hundreds of pages...what will be the best page title practice in mentioning "brand & keyword" across all pages of sub-directory to benefit in-terms if SEO? Can we add "vertigo tiles" to all pages of sub-directory? Or we must not give same phrase? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Best way to link to 1000 city landing pages from index page in a way that google follows/crawls these links (without building country pages)?
Currently we have direct links to the top 100 country and city landing pages on our index page of the root domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
I would like to add in the index page for each country a link "more cities" which then loads dynamically (without reloading the page and without redirecting to another page) a list with links to all cities in this country.
I do not want to dillute "link juice" to my top 100 country and city landing pages on the index page.
I would still like google to be able to crawl and follow these links to cities that I load dynamically later. In this particular case typical site hiearchy of country pages with links to all cities is not an option. Any recommendations on how best to implement?0 -
Moving multiple Sites to One Site and SEO Impact/Ideas
Hi there, We are in the process of moving 2 sites with higher page authority to another site we own (that is our company brand), so essentially 3 sites into one. We're at risk of losing a lot of SEO from the original 2 sites that have all the product information. We are doing this since we merged companies a couple years back and need one web precense. Anyhow, the site launch date is in 3 months and the recommendation is to start moving content over prior to that for top pages, which is a big undertaking when we are launching all the pages again with new content, redeisgn and moving sites in 3 months. If it's the right move, we should do it, but I just wanted to get opinions on how others have handled something similiar when moving to a site with lower site authority and trying not to lose rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
Links / Metadata around Recent Posts etc in Wordpress / Blog - Good SEO Practice?
Hello In a Wordpress blog ( or part of an ecommerce site that runs under wordpress ) it is good to show recent posts in the sidebar on most pages. Obviously the posts aren't going to be relevant to every post , so my questions are: Is having these on the page hurting SEO for the page? Is there good metadata structure to put in there? ( like rel="nofollow" or similar ) Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear
Thanks for your time
Marty0 -
Client rebranded with a new website but can't migrate now defunct franchise website to new website.
Hi everyone, My client is a chain of franchised restaurants with a local domain website named after the franchise. The franchise exited the market while the client stayed and built its own brand with a separate website. The franchise website (which is extremely popular) will be shut down soon but the client will not be able to redirect the franchise website to the new website for legal reasons. What can I do to ensure that we start ranking immediately for the franchise keyphrase as soon as the franchise website is shutdown. We currently have the new website and access to the old website (which we can't redirect) Thanks, T
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tarek_Lel0 -
Microsite Subfolder URL vs Redirected TLD for best SEO
We have a healthcare microsite that is in a subfolder off a hospital site.They wanted to keep their TLD and redirect from the subfolder URL. Even with good on-page SEO, link building, etc., they're not organically ranking as well as we think they should be. ie. They have http://our-business-name.com vs. http://hospital.org/our-business-name/ For best SEO value, are they better off having only their homepage as TLD and not redirect any interior pages but display as subfolder URL? ie. Keep homepage as http://our-business-name.com but use hospital urls for interior pages http://hospital.org/our-business-name/about/ Or is there some better way to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IT-dmd0 -
Duplicate Content http://www.website.com and http://website.com
I'm getting duplicate content warnings for my site because the same pages are getting crawled twice? Once with http://www.website.com and once with http://website.com. I'm assuming this is a .htaccess problem so I'll post what mine looks like. I think installing WordPress in the root domain changed some of the settings I had before. My main site is primarily in HTML with a blog at http://www.website.com/blog/post-name BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thirdseo
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress0 -
WWW vs Non-WWW/Moving a site to a new CMS/Redirect all of the previous URLs
We are working on a new design for a website, which is currently on a CMS that has non-seo-friendly URLs. There is no redirection of 'www' to non-www or vice versa, or handling of homepage redirection so there is only one instance of 'home'. To move the site in the future, all of these URLs will have to be redirected to their new, and I hope, seo-friendly counterparts. Is it prudent now to redirect the four home page links so there is only one? and to redirect all non-www to 'www' so there is only one instance of each page? Or should I leave it and redirect all of them when the time comes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | haan_seo0