undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • MozCon
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    Let your business shine with Listings AI
    Moz Local

    Let your business shine with Listings AI

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers

      Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
  4. Changing Brand and Domain Name - SEO Impacts

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

Intermediate & Advanced SEO
4
5
3.6k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • piazza
    piazza Subscriber last edited by Jun 3, 2016, 1:49 AM

    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

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • varun1800
      varun1800 last edited by Jun 3, 2016, 9:41 AM Jun 3, 2016, 9:41 AM

      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:

      1. Redirect all the old website URLs to the relevant URLs of the new website

      2. Keep a close eye on Google webmaster to analyze and fix 404 errors

      3. If you have subdomains linking to old website, redirect them to the new domain

      4. Setup sitemap for your new domain

      5. Do press release for your new brand so that visitors can know about the change

      6. 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

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • piazza
        piazza Subscriber @Bigb06 last edited by Jun 3, 2016, 8:31 AM Jun 3, 2016, 8:31 AM

        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

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Bryggselv.no
          Bryggselv.no last edited by Jun 3, 2016, 8:22 AM Jun 3, 2016, 8:22 AM

          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:

          1. Create XML sitemap for old website
          2. 301 each individual page from Old Domain to exactly or closest corresponding page on New Domain
          3. Ping search engines from the old site with the old XML sitemap, so that they may as quickly as possible discover the move
          4. Keep a close eye on Google Webmaster Tools for crawl/error messages and indexation issues
          5. Track # of indexed pages on Old and New domain
          6. Submit new XML sitemap from New Domain 2 weeks after launch
          7. 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 🙂

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Bigb06
            Bigb06 last edited by Jun 3, 2016, 5:19 AM Jun 3, 2016, 5:19 AM

            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
            piazza 1 Reply Last reply Jun 3, 2016, 8:31 AM Reply Quote 1
            • 1 / 1
            1 out of 5
            • First post
              1/5
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • vtmoz

              Linking from & to in domains and sub-domains

              What's the best optimised linking between sub-domains and domains? And every time we'll give website link at top with logo...do we need to link sub-domain also with all it's pages? If example.com is domain and example.com/blog is sub-domain or sub-folder... Do we need to link to example.com from /blog? Do we need to give /blog link in all pages of /blog? Is there any difference in connecting domains with sub-domains and sub-folders?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Nov 17, 2016, 2:45 PM | vtmoz
              0
            • RosemaryB

              Does collapsing content impact Google SEO signals?

              Recently I have been promoting custom long form content development for major brand clients.  For UX reasons we collapse the content so only 2-3 sentences of the first paragraph are visible.  However there is a "read more" link that expands the entire content piece.
              I have believed that the searchbots would have no problem crawling, indexing and applying a positive SEO signal for this content.  However I'm starting to wonder.  Is there any evidence that the Google search algorithm could possible discount or even ignore collapsed content?

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 20, 2016, 6:37 PM | RosemaryB
              1
            • manasag

              How to target for misspelled Brand name searches

              Hi to all the SEO experts here, I am working on SEO of my 4 months old website. For example, its 'abz.com'. We like the brand name 'abz' for the business and we are able to SEO well for keyword 'abz'. However, we would also like to target for the keyword 'abc'. There are 2 reasons for that: 'abc' is an actual word. So there is a possibility that our users may type 'abc' instead of 'abz' to reach us. For 'abc', the top result is 'abct.us', which is a site of adult in nature. Also our website doesn't feature at all in the results. This is hitting us hard in terms of or brand visibility. So the questions are: How to feature in results of keyword search of 'abc'? Will the following approach work: Buying an available domain 'abc.co.in', and use it to feature in 'abc' results and 301 redirect to 'abz.com' Having 'abc' in the page meta (title and description). This is hard for us, since we need to rethink our taglines and copyrights. 2. If we search for 'abz', Google says "Do you mean abc". Is there a way to not have this suggestion? It would helpful to have some more ideas for this problem.

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 18, 2016, 4:43 PM | manasag
              0
            • 94501

              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 | Jul 2, 2015, 1:30 PM | 94501
              0
            • nm1977

              How to recover google rank after changing the domain name?

              I just started doing SEO for a new client. The case is a bit unique as they build a new website and for some reason lunched in under another domain name. Old name is foodstepsinasia.com and new one is foodstepsinasiatravel.com OLD one is a respected webites with 35 in MOZ page authority and with +15000 incomming link (104 root domains) NEW one is curently on 0 The programmer has just that build the new website has set it up so that when people write or find the old domain name it redirect to the front page of the new website with the new domain name. this caused that my friends lost a lot of their rankings was so I believ it was a very bad solution. But I also think I can get most of the old rankings back, but my question is what to do now to get as much back of the rankings as fast as possible?? A) I believe I must change the domain name back to foodstepsinasia.com on the new website ? O B) Should I on the old website try finding the url of the pages with most page authority and recreate these urls on the new website or should i redict them to a page with related content? Looking forward to feedback from someone who have experience with similar cases. Thanks!

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 22, 2015, 9:20 PM | nm1977
              0
            • jhariani

              SEO Impact of High Volume Vertical and Horizontal Internal Linking

              Hello Everyone - I maintain a site with over a million distinct pages of content. Each piece of content can be thought of like a node in graph database or an entity. While there is a bit of natural hierarchy, every single entity can be related to one or more other entities. The conceptual structure of the entities like so: Agency - A top level business unit ( ~100 pages/urls) Office - A lower level business unit, part of an Agency ( ~5,000 pages/urls) Person - Someone who works in one or more Offices ( ~80,000 pages/urls) Project - A thing one or more People is managing ( ~750,000 pages/urls) Vendor - A company that is working on one or more Projects ( ~250,000 pages/urls) Category - A descriptive entity, defining one or more Projects ( ~1,000 pages/urls) Each of these six entities has a unique (url) and content. For each page/url, there are internal links to each of the related entity pages. For example, if a user is looking at a Project page/url, there will be an internal link to one or more Agencies, Offices, People, Vendors, and Categories. Also, a Project will have links to similar Projects. This same theory holds true for all other entities as well. People pages link to their related Agencies, Offices, Projects, Vendors, etc, etc. If you start to do the math, there are tons of internal links leading to pages with tons of internal links leading to pages with tons of internal links. While our users enjoy the ability to navigate this world according to these relationships, I am curious if we should force a more strict hierarchy for SEO purposes. Essentially, does it make sense to "nofollow" all of the horizontal internal links for a given entity page/url? For search engine indexing purposes, we have legit sitemaps that give a simple vertical hierarchy...but I am curious if all of this internal linking should be hidden via nofollow...? Thanks in advance!

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 20, 2015, 10:41 PM | jhariani
              2
            • Berner

              NEw domain extensions, are they worth it seo wise?

              Hello I am curious if all of these new extensions for domains are worth it? So say you are a home builder and you bought homebuilder.construction - where as construction is a new extension, does this help seo? Or is it all just a big sales gimmick? Thank you for your thoughts

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Apr 27, 2014, 10:15 PM | Berner
              1
            • 6thirty

              Should you include domain / brand in Meta Title

              Hello, I am trying to come up with a strategy for creating meta title information for my eCommerce store. I have read mixed reviews on the examples below. The first includes the company / brand in the meta title and thus is included in SE results. The second does not. Probably not a 'right' answer here so I look forward to answers with rationale... also open to a completely difference strategy all together! 1MR Vortex by BPI Sports - $Company_Name OR 1MR Vortex by BPI Sports - Pre Workout Supplement Thanks!

              Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 19, 2014, 3:31 AM | 6thirty
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.