Rebranding & Minimizing SEO impact
-
Hello everyone,
One of my clients is undergoing a major rebrand, which will require some substantial changes to their domain / URL structure. Primarily, we're going to:
- Move from a high-ish DA site to a low DA site
- Change the subdomain URL structure (more on that below)
- Update the content (copy, design, structure) on www. site to match the new brand
- The content on the subdomains should remain the same
- 301 redirect all pages from old site to new site where applicable
The current site architecture makes great use of subdomains, which are also going to be changing in terms of name. So, we're moving from oldsubdomain.olddomain.com to newsubdomain.newdomain.com (and not oldsubdomian.olddomain.com to oldsubdomain.olddomain.com). The content / structure of these pages is going to change minimally.
We understand that we're going to take an SEO hit overall, but are there things we can do to minimize this hit? Anyway we can 'estimate' the hit? Anyway we can educate our client to as to what to expect beyond (it is going to be bad…).
Please let me know.
Thanks!
-
I can understand your situation Josh..!!
But, as per my opinion, You should show the clear picture to your client. Be frank with your client. Tell him statistics that If we do this kind of things then it will be resulted in this.
Make your client aware about how big changes you are going to do. OR You can give recent example of Moz.com. They have done something similar things. They have made 301 redirects for all seomoz.com URLs on Moz.com. You can see its current PR and DA and all kind of things. So, Collect such data and show your client the realistic view.
-
Hi Josh,
I'm doing a similar thing - not exactly the same as we are merging 2 websites into one and then just for the fun of it putting the whole lot onto a new domain...
We've not done this yet as our new site is being built. Anyway, I found this webinar really useful: http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition and this blog post: http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons
I hope they help!
All the best,
Amelia
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
-
Considering Moving to New Domain and SEO
Hello, One of our sites has been using a domain since 2005 and is shown below. The domain is terrible for multiple reasons, hyphens and doesn't even reflect our actual company name. Not to mention its embarrassing when telling a customer to email us at support @ pro "dash, yes the hyphen" gift.... I wanted to change it long ago but feared it would hurt my SEO rankings. After taking Bruce Clay's training class back in 2004, we managed to rank top 10 for most targeted keywords. My ranking have slowly dropped over time due to neglect and decaying IBL's. We still rank for a few targeted keywords but it was just August of 2017 we were still top 10 but something happened and we dropped out of the top 100 right before our holiday season. We had to run Adwords and BingAds to supplement traffic this holiday season. So I am wondering before I restart my SEO efforts should I move the domain now before trying to build new content, IBL's, etc? I was always under the impression Google used domain trust a major factor which wasnt only IBL but also domain age. Our preferred domain I purchased from another owner and it has ZERO links to it. It was basically a parked domain with the "domain for sale" stuff. I am a little nervous about moving it over because Google didnt even have it in its index. I put up a coming soon page and hosted it on my server, same C Block, and requested a crawl from my webmaster console. I added some text to the new domain index page and it appears Google is showing results for our old domain! At first I thought it was duplicate content but its not Google obviously has deciphered current site is my old domain and is displaying the title and meta data from the old domain. I have never seen this before. Google cache shows the current domain the new domain url. A few questions: Will my site get sandboxed after 301 redirecting and going webmaster console move features etc? Does this reset the trust factors? I have read examples in my research where some people say it only took a few weeks and everything was back to normal and others that have said it took years. Any experience or insight is greatly appreciated. I am currently relearning SEO and going over the SEO tutorial articles provided on moz. Thanks again! New Domain - matches our company name, no hyphens, better branding http://www.giftbasketpros.com/ Google index https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.giftbasketpros.com Current Domain, since 2005, has ranked well for years until this summer http://www.pro-gift-baskets.com/
Branding | | DMAC441 -
Rebrandly vs. Bitly?
I want an alternative to Bitly (because we must change our short domain (BSD) and Bitly Support for its free service is excruciatingly bad; I'd gladly pay). Rebrandly appears to be a good alternative at $100. per year. Can anyone recommend Rebrandly and speak to its strengths and weaknesses vs. Bitly? Thank you. Rick
Branding | | Knockleigh0 -
Community Discussion: Do you agree that brand recognition has an empirical impact on organic search rankings?
And could hard metrics — such as search queries, citations, traffic, and click-through rates — influence organic search rankings? Tom Coad “StickyEyes” tackles both these questions in this post for YouMoz. Take a peek at his research, and let us know how it compares to your own findings. If you haven't done any research yourself along these lines, I'd love to hear your answers to these same questions based on your more casual observations and analysis of the brands you monitor in the SERPs.
Branding | | Christy-Correll6 -
My 40 year old, well established business has a brand name that I think is hurting my SEO. Need advice please.
Our business brand name has words in it which when we were using it as our domain name, was a) bad for our SEO and b) got our emails marked as spam in our client's inboxes. This was not a problem when we first got online, years ago. It eventually became problematic, but we didn't realize it for some time. When we realized the issue, we simply changed our domain name to something more SEO friendly, using exact match keywords. This was fine for a while, but eventually, algorithms changed again, and now with Google putting an emphasis on Brand Names and not looking as kindly on exact match keyword type domains, we are again at a place where we don't know what to do. We can't change our brand name. I don't want to post our real name or business here, but I will give an example. Brand Name: Living Free Travel The Issue: "Free Travel" gets blocked by spam filters, gets us useless traffic from people looking for free travel (which makes out bounce rates very high), gets our domain blacklisted. The Solution: travel2europe.com is the website of Living Free Travel The New Issue: travel2europe.com is not our brand, and probably doesn't look like one to Google, especially since on our site, travel2europe.com is never really mentioned because it is only our domain, not our brand. "Living Free Travel" is generally the anchor text for travel2europe.com wherever we are linked to. We assume this mismatch is problematic for us in ways we don't even know. Are we screwed? Need advice, please. THANK YOU.
Branding | | benenjerry0 -
Enhancing SEO Between WordPress Blog and Company Website
My company has recently launched a new and improved website within the last couple months. Unfortunately, the web developers that we'd hired to build and create the site work very little with SEO, thus leaving me in the dark on where to direct any questions regarding the optimization of our web content. Along with the new website design, we've also rolled out a WordPress blog related to our firm. We do have the blog embedded onto a page of our website, and clicking on any title will redirect the viewer to our WordPress blog, hosted separately from our website. My question is this--how do you suggest I drive viewers from our blog to our website, rather than vice versa? Are there any applications, widgets, etc that you could recommend that would help me better associate the blog with our company? Any advice would help. Thanks!
Branding | | LMcLaughlin0 -
Impact on Global SEO of Losing One Regional Site
Hi, Plans are in place to have an affiliate company take over the marketing, sale, and distribution of our products in one region of the 35 that we currently operate in. The regional site is responsible for 10% of our overall global traffic. 26% of the revenue to that specific site comes from organic search traffic. The question is whether the loss of this traffic and these pages will have any negative impact on our global SEO status?
Branding | | Corel0 -
Law Practice SEO with Multiple Lawyers
I am working with a friend of mine who is a lawyer. He has one partner and a couple of other lawyers at the firm. The attorneys each have their own Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin ,Youtube and other social media accounts. I am trying to create one brand, which is the name of the law firm. Question 1: It would make sense to me to create all social media accounts under the law firm name. Would you agree on this? I'm worried that users wouldn't use the company facebook page if they are used to communicating to the attorney through their personal accounts. Maybe I should put the social media links for the firm on the home page only and then put the individual social media links next to the attorney profile page? Question 2: The firm has been posting Youtube videos but under one of the attorney's names. I have 16 new videos they want posted and they asked me if they should be posted to a new company name channel (yet to be created) or post them under one of the attorneys accounts? I think that most attorneys might look out for themselves ahead of the Firm. If they ever change jobs, they don't have a built up social profile if everything is listed under the firm name. Maybe the way to go would be to help optimize both the attorneys personal profiles and then the firm? Thoughts?
Branding | | Czubmeister0 -
Russian and Arabic SEO and Translation
Hi guys, We've a small 15 page site in English for renting out our own boat to tourists which seems to be especially popular with Russian and Arab visitors, so they are our priority languages for translation right now. We would like to translate our site into a condensed single page summary for each language of the services we offer for now and trying to make it rank in Russian/Arab serarch engines. I do some seo in English on our site and it's starting to rank well, but that's my only language, so I would definitely need to hire someone to do it for us in Russian and Arabic translation and related keyword phrases and how to rank in the search engines those countries most use etc. Can you recommend any companies for doing this russian-seo or arabic-seo stuff? Or any other advice.. Thanks!
Branding | | emerald0