Switching URL from keyword heaven to actual brand name?

[grayloon]

Our client has a site, we'll say it's delicious-lemonade.com (That's an example.)

Their brand name, however, is PowerSky. (That's an example, but the point is that it's the name of a technology, and has NOTHING to do whatsoever with being a drink. Someone would never guess what the product was, by the brand name.)

The client has this domain name for a long time. The domain name itself is a top keyword for their product.

We are building a new site for the client and have planned to use the brand name (PowerSky) as the primary domain, so PowerSky.com, with the product page being PowerSky.com/Delicious-Lemonade. And we are planning to redirect Delicious-Lemonade.com to PowerSky.com.

However, we are concerned about the SEO hit the site is going to take.

What recommendations can you make in this situation?

[JasonJackson]

Full disclosure: I'm no sage in SEO.

Do the appropriate 301 redirects for each page.  Grit your teeth as you take a small hit.  Then watch http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/what-signals-could-make-you-a-brand-in-google

[Francisco_Meza]

Sounds like you are doing a category instead of a product. You have a couple options. 1) Do what you are describing 2) Apache Mod Rewrite and 301 the old urls. I saw a video of Rand talking about option 2. He says it'll lose all it's ranking at 1st, but they typically see about a 50-60% drop in volume once it's back up.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Grayloon,

I'm going through older questions that are still marked unanswered. Did you come to a decision about what to do, or are you still looking for some insight?

[grayloon]

We are still looking for some insight. Since the answers we got weren't from SEOMoz staff, we just took them as more opinions.

[KeriMorgret]

You have a couple of options. You can try asking this question again in public Q&A, as the site has a lot more activity than it did in April. Another option is to use a private Q&A question and ask this where only SEOmoz staff and associates can see it. The advantage there is that the question is private and not indexed, and the staff/associates are under an NDA and won't disclose the contents of the question so you can use real URLs if needed.