My client wants to rebrand their company including URL...

[BBuck]

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!

[DJ123]

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.

[Andy-Halliday]

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.

[DJ123]

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.

[irvingw]

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.

[Er_Maqui]

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.

[DanielMulderNL]

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-domain

JavaScript 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.

[zharriet]

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