My client wants to rebrand their company including URL...
-
Hi all! An easy one for probably most of you. I have a client who wants to re-brand their business name and also match their URL to the new name. Their current domain name URL has been out there for over 5 years, and the site is performing quite well in search. Switching to a new URL will obviously be a very bad thing, but what are the options? newname.com redirect to the aged oldname.com, but when they are on the site, or when they find them in search, the oldname.com has nothing to do with the new brand.
Or should we 301 every page of the oldname.com site to the newname.com be good enough? What is recommended?
Thanks!
-
We recently changed our domain name to match our brand. I read everything on Google and Bing Webmaster about domain moves.
I redirected (301) each page individually to the matching new page. (Ok, we moved to WordPress from html/css and used the HTML 2 Import plugin so there was a lovely list of all the redirects for the webmaster to install on the old website)
One thing I did that was bad was made a placeholder page for the old homepage informing people of the move. I corrected that and 301'd the old home page to the new home page. I should have done that straight away.
Then I used the Site Address Change tools in Google and Bing Webmasters to notify them of the move.
Ours is a smaller site (~800 pages) and site traffic moved with it.
I'm checking links now to ask external links to update our info.
These articles helped, but there are lots more if you search for Google Webmaster domain move.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en
https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/6033102?hl=en&ref_topic=6029673
-
Just some code. To tired for branding discussion But a 302 is the sort of redirect to use when wanting to maintain PageRank on domain.old and redirect to domain.new in the same practical manner as with the 301. Difference: 302 means moved temporarily and 301 moved permanently. I would actually not advice a 302 redirect and maintaining 2 parallel domains in most cases. It doesn't solve the problem structurally and is like insulin. It keeps the patient alive and well but it doesn't cure an obsolete system running only to serve the next few lines of code and nothing else. For Apache best method for 302 redirect:
mod_rewrite method
RewriteEngine On
rewritecond %{http_host} ^yoursite.nl
rewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.newsite.nl/$1 [R=302,L]PHP method
Please lookup http://moz.com/community/q/experience-of-moving-to-a-new-domainJavaScript or other client side scripts Don not redirect with client side scripts. This is the fools choice!
Microsoft Internet Information Server and MS family See Client side scripts and you cant be a SEO if you want this. For the instructions I refer to: ~back of server disc and dial the number on it for someone who cares
!!! Watch out if you do not know what you are doing when adding rules to mod_rewrite. It is called the voodoo module by webmasters and developers for a good reason.
It's fuzzy stuff and they say it's logical as can be. It's like telling someone something really important in reverse while they answer normally or something, It's just weird and if not understood in 4 hours then you will probally never understand. Catch is that if done wrong Apache is not answering anymore for no one until undone manually. If comfortable add it to Apache httpd.conf. Alternative is putting it in .htaccess and placing this file in the document root(!) of the website which usually equates to http://website.com. Last method is sort of stupid as it simulates the vodoo box but it's not as cost effective for system resources as mod_rewrite which is the reason to want risk it in the first place.
-
You can make a redirect directly without code in apache, with the RedirectModule. The code are as simple as:
<virtualhost mydomain.com:80="">ServerName mydomain.com
RedirectPermanent / http://www.newdomain.com/
DocumentRoot /your/www/root/</virtualhost>With this apache creates a 301 for every requested page in mydomain.com to www.newdomain.com. This also can be good for using www.domain.com instead of domain.com and avoid duplicates.
But, as i've said by other people, rebranding is always a bad idea. I can recomend you to try to mantain the old URL, and make a new one for the new brand. You can try to get some SEO to the new web with links on the old, and have these webs with shigtly different content. This possible is the better idea.
-
Agree, don't rebrand, too much risk of losing traffic. Or keep the old site and create a new brand site so you have two sites, just don't tie them together in anyway. The only issue with that is it needs to be all unique content.
-
If you are using Wordpress as a CMS, it is possible to 301 on a page level per page. It is a custom field if you are using certain Wordpress frameworks, or something like Yoast SEO.
You could load the 301 redirect values into the database table via phpmyadmin or similar, but if you don't know what you are doing you can screw the whole site up, so if you don't know what I am saying, don't try it this way.
-
Don't rebrand. Would try everything to get them not to re-brand there are numerous examples where you don't get your visibility back after months / years.
Appliances Online changed to AO.com and have done a huge TV campaign in the UK, but they have never recovered there search visibility (info from Searchmetrics).
I would advise stay away from at all costs.
If the client defiantly wants to, my web designer simply put in a few lines of code onto the old domain, and if a customer types in an oldurl.com/webpage25 it redirects to newurl.com/webpage25 so that you don't have to 301 every page.
He has just left for the day, but if no one else can give the answer by the morning I will let you know how he has done it.
But my advice stay away from rebranding.
-
301 each page to the new page on the new re-branded URL. Pay particular attention to the ones getting a ton of traffic (whatever a ton looks like for that specific site). You will be better off to do that, rather than do a domain-wide 301 redirect from a number of perspectives.
Don't burn a 5 year old domain, that takes too much time and effort to just abandon it.
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
-
Competing URLs
Hi We have a number of blogs that compete with our homepage for some keywords/phrases. The URLs of the blogs contain the keywords/phrases. I would like to re-work the blogs so that they target different keywords that don't compete and are more relevant. Should I change the URLs as I think this is what is mainly causing the issue? If so, should I 301 old URL's to the homepage? For example, say we we're a site that specialised in selling plastic cups. Currently there is a blog with the URL www.mysite.com/plastic-cups that outranks the homepage for _plastic cups. _The blog isn't particularly relevant to plastic cups and the homepage should rank for this term. How should I let Google know that it is the homepage that is most relevant for this term? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Buffalo_71 -
URL in russian
Hi everyone, I am doing an audit of a site that currently have a lot of 500 errors due to the russian langage. Basically, all the url's look that way for every page in russian: http://www.exemple.com/ru-kg/pешения-для/food-packaging-machines/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexrbrg
http://www.exemple.com/ru-kg/pешения-для/wood-flour-solutions/
http://www.exemple.com/ru-kg/pешения-для/cellulose-solutions/ I am wondering if this error is really caused by the server or if Google have difficulty reading the russian langage in URL's. Is it better to have the URL's only in english ?0 -
ECommerce Replatforming URL's
We are in the process of re-platforming our eCommerce site to Magento 2. For the most part, the majority of site content will remain the same. Unfortunately on our current platform, we have been inconsistent with the use of .html as a URL suffix. As a result, our category and product pages are half and half - /stainless-steel-hardware.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BoatOutfitters
&
/stainless-steel-hardware We are considering taking the opportunity to clean up and standardize our URLs. (Drop the .html from all URLs on the new site and 301 redirect these to the same URL without the .html) Our concern is that many of the .html pages are good categories with strong page rank and I've read many articles about page rank loss from 301 redirects. We are debating internally if it really makes sense to take an SEO hit for something is seemingly small as dropping the .html from the URL. It would be a no-brainer if we were taking the opportunity to change to more SEO friendly natural language URLs. However currently our URL's appear acceptable with the exception of the inconsistent suffix. Thanks in advance for any insight on how you would approach this!2 -
If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?
If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb0 -
Tagged URL ranking organically
I've noticed that one of our GA tagged urls are ranking organically & therefore is skewing the referral data. The campaign that we were tracking is no longer active but the link still works, but it's going to an old landing page. I asked our developers if we could redirect it but they said that it didn't work. Does anyone have some advise or a solution for this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Elihn0 -
What are partial urls and why this is causing a sitemap error?
Hi mozzers, I have a client that recorded 7 errors when generating Xml sitemap. One of the errors appear to be coming from partial urls and apparently I would need to exclude them from sitemap. What are they exactly and why would they cause an error in the sitemap. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
URL Keyword Structure and Importance
Hey Guys, I've done quite a bit of research on this but still can't decide what the correct answer is, so was hoping the Moz community might be able to give some clarification. Say I have a URL **www.yourdomain.com/product/domain-names **is there any benefit in changing my site's backend structure (a relatively lengthly process) so the URL can read **www.yourdomain.com/domain-names **without the 'product' slug? I understand keywords in the URL can have a small impact on SEO, but does the positioning to this degree play any part? Any advice would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paragongroup
Cheers.0 -
Best approach for a client with another site for the same company
I have a client who has an old website and company A handles the SEO campaign for this site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ao500000
My client wanted us to create a new website with unique content for the same company aiming to double his chances of ranking on the 1st of SERP's and eventually dominating it.
So we created the new site for him and handled it's SEO campaign. So far we are ranking decently on the search engines but we feel like we could do better. The site we are optimizing for him uses the same company, tracking number and a virtual address in the same city.
Do you think Google has a problem with this set up?
We have listed the new site in the citation directories but I'm worried that we are sending google mixed signals. The company has two listing on each directories, one for the old site and another for the new site.
Another thing, Google+ Local for the new site is created and verified but is not showing up in local pack.
What is the best way to approach this mess?
We are looking into ranking for both local & organic results.0