Using one domain for email and another domain for your website, but redirects...

[shpala]

We are rebranding and our new name is fairly lengthy.  We own all main domain versions of our brand name - .com, .new and .org  - There is a very high search volume for the new brand name as it is a merger of 2 popular existing brands so want to take advantage of that and use our full name within our website domain name.

However, since the name is a little long as mentioned - 25 characters - we also own the 3 character acronym of the new brand so we are debating on using the acronym for our new email addresses.  ie name@abc.com so it is user friendly.

We would obviously redirect the acronym email domain to point to the longer website domain.

Are there any negative SEO effects if we do that?  Use the longer domain for the website and shorter acronym for our email?

Thank you

[GrouchyKids]

I think the use of a long domain name as you have suggested and an acronym is not the most sensible decision from a branding perspective.   Acronyms seem to only work in very specific instances if you stop to think about it.Branding is an incredibly complex area, I would suggest that you really look into this. I would recommend books like Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind By Al Ries and Jack TroutI also think that as you presumably own the websites owned by both brands that you could do something that would work by redirecting them to a new site with a wholly different (Awesome) name that works for the user.Hope that helps.

[RuthBurrReedy]

From a purely SEO perspective, I don't think there will be any negative impact from using the acronym URL for your email addresses and the longer URL for your domain — the only concern I might have would be that people might try to link to the acronym domain after seeing your email, and those links would be passing through the redirect, but that would probably be an edge case.

I do think that 25 characters is a very lonnnngg domain name. If it's your brand, you're likely to rank #1 for it without having the exact new brand as the domain name, so you'll be capturing that high search volume anyway. You also have to think about this as a long-term play: there's a lot of search interest for the two brand names together now, because of the merger, but that's not the best reason to select a new brand name or a new domain name, both of which are things you'd want to persist for as long as possible, well after the merger is old news.

I know it might be too late for this, but I'd echo GrouchyKids' recommendation that you rethink how you want to brand the merger of these two brands. High search volume for one term isn't a great reason. If you do decide that you still want that to be your new brand name, you might still want to explore shorter versions of the new brand for your domain name. A 25-character URL is going to lose out on some direct traffic, as it will be difficult for repeat customers to remember and type in exactly (something your company must already be aware of, since they're looking for solutions not to have to type out the whole thing themselves every time they send an email!). Good luck with the rebrand in either case!