Rebranding and Domain Name Changes

[KenjiCrosland]

Hi All,

One of my clients wants to rebrand http://indiaretailnews.com/ so that it's clear that the site is under the operational umbrella of http://tradebriefs.com/. indiaretailnews.com has a lower domain authority of 20, but because of the domain name it ranks number #2 for the keyword "retail news" for Google India.

The client's question:

Can we change the site names to TradeBriefsRetail.com  orTradeBriefsIndiaRetail.com without affecting the SEO on each site? How do we do this – redirect from TradeBriefsIndiaRetail.com to IndiaRetailNews.com and so on or simply put all the content on the new sites and get rid of the old domains or some other way? Do long domain names cause a problem?

Another option is TradeBriefsRetail.in, etc with the domain extension showing the country that the content is for.. In a year or two, we will be expanding to markets outside India.

My opinion:

Keep the old domains and redirect to something like http://tradebriefs.com/india-retail-news

Or perhaps a subdomain:

http://indiaretailnews.tradebriefs.com

In the short term, I'd imagine rankings will drop, but if we wanted to consolidate domain authority, I was thinking that http://tradebriefs.com/india-retail-news would be the best bet.

Thoughts?

Kenji

[RobertFisher]

In the total and in the beginning, you will affect the SEO with the change, but the question becomes how much. 
Another consideration is brand equity and whether you would lose any. If, the only reason for changing is to show that one is under the umbrella of the other, I am not sure of that as a good strategy. Why not just put something on the site that makes that clear?

If however, you are having dupe content issues, want to consolidate staff, want to try and boost one site, etc. then you can 301 A to B. With the tradebriefs having higher authority, I would do as you suggest doing and go to it. So, indiaretail 301's each url to the appropriate url on tradebriefs. Not 301 indiaretail.com to trade briefs.com.

The last two with subdomain and sub directory is not the way to go IMO. The subdomain is its own domain and does not share linking, etc. With the way you are showing a single sub directory, that would kill a ton on your site and you would waste a lot of your linking.

The 301 url to url is the way to go.

Hope that helps,

Robert

[KenjiCrosland]

Thanks Robert! This helps.

If we were going to go the URL to URL route, would there be any reason not to redirect to a subdirectory?

For example: http://indiaretailnews.com/index.php/best-practices/industry

Would be 301'd to

http://tradebriefs.com/india-retail-news/best-practices/industry

Wouldn't this be a good way to consolidate?

[RobertFisher]

Yes, it is. I thought you were going to redirect the whole site to a single sub dir.

If you want a really good tutorial, this Best Practice on SEOmoz is really thorough.

I am pretty sure when I looked you were on a LAMP stack with the sites so should not present any probs. 
Best

[KenjiCrosland]

Thanks for the resource. Much appreciated!