Why does my old brand name still show up on organic search but as my new brand name and domain?

[Virginia-Girtz]

Hello mozers!

I have quite the conundrum. My client used to have the unfortunate brand name "Meetoo" - which by the way they had before the movement happened! So naturally, they rebranded to the name Vevox in March 2019 to avoid confusion to users.

However, when you search for their old brand name "Meetoo" the first organic link that pops up is their domain www.vevox.com. Now, this wouldn't normally be a problem, however it is when any #MeToo news appears in the media and we get a sudden influx or wrong traffic.

I've searched the HTML and content for the term "Meetoo" but can only find one trace of this name through a widget. Not enough to hold an organic spot.

My only other thinking is that www.vevox.com is redirected from www.meetoo.com. So I'm assuming this is why Vevox appear under the search term "Meetoo".

How can I remove the homepage www.vevox.com from appearing for the search term "meetoo"?

Can anyone help?

AvGGYBc

[pilesofpillows]

According to Ahrefs, 21% of their referring domains have the exact anchor text "meetoo", this is leading Google to think it that https://www.vevox.com is relevant for that term. Also the old website meetoo.com is 301 redirecting too vevox.com, which is another signal that Google is seeing that also makes them relevant for "meetoo".

I would recommend keeping the 301 redirect in place, but you may have to do a "link audit" to see if you can edit some links pointing to https://www.vevox.com that have the anchor text "metoo" as well as build or gain new links that say "Vevox" or "https://www.vevox.com" to help outweigh them.

The other option is to wait it out as I imagine Google will eventually figure out that https://www.vevox.com is not what the searcher is looking for when they search "metoo", unfortunately the wait it out method could take months or longer.

[Virginia-Girtz]

Hi Nicolas,

Aaah yes of course! The backlinks is something I'm working on with Vevox at the moment to try and remove or edit, but as you're probably aware, it's a really slow process to complete.

I don't suppose you have any quicker alternatives than just emailing all the linking domains and asking them to update their URLs do you?

[pilesofpillows]

Not that I know of unfortunately.

If they were local business listings you could use Moz Local, Yext or BrightLocal, but it doesn't look like that is the case. I would just let the client know it may take some time, but with continued link building efforts Google will eventually start to drop Vevox from the search results for MeeToo.