Rebranding/Url Structure Change

[MattJD]

Hi Everyone,

First off thanks for taking the time to looking at my question. I was wondering about rebranding and URL structure changes. Right now my company is planning on changing their domain and doing a massive change to their site which includes a url structure change. The idea is in September they will be changing the site to be a combination of wordpress and ruby on rails (currently the site is ruby on rails). The homepage and design on the site will be completely different and parts of the site will be in php and other parts will be in ruby. The URL structure will also be changing completely at the same time. Each page will be completely different in structure, including the homepage (currently now it redirects you to a subfolder page that is your local page [i.e. nyc if you are in new york]). Then, the following month, they will be changing their domain name to a different domain.

I have asked them to do this in stages. First the domain, second the rebrand, and third the URL restructuring or we could lose SEO traffic but they asked a freelancer his opinion and the freelancer said that you could do the rebrand change with the URL restructure and then domain later and while you're SEO may disappear, it'll definitely return in 3 to 4 months. Could you tell me who is right and what the correct method is to make this change?

[SamuelScott]

In general, it is best to do all of the changes (the domain, branding, and URL work) all on a development site (that is blocking search engines) and then release the new site only after everything is complete. If you space it out piecemeal over too long of a time, it will look very messy both to Google and your website visitors. Releasing a new, properly-migrated website all at once is the quickest way to mitigate any "SEO" damage and return to your prior traffic and ranking levels quickly.

However, it'd be impossible for me or anyone to be more specific without doing a deep dive into your site. However, there are some general best practices for site migrations. For reference on all of these, I'd take a look at what Moz did when migrating from seomoz.org to moz.com. Moz has a webinar and associated blog post that goes through all of the technical details and results. Aleyda Solis also has a good migration checklist with links to more resources here.

I hope that helps -- good luck!