Co-citation - do you lose co-citation benefits if you change your company name?

[Carla_Dawson]

I'll give an example. Seomoz became Moz. What happens to all the citations that still say Seomoz? Is Google smart enough to redirect co-citations to the new URL?

Thanks

Carla

[Atlanta-SMO]

I am not sure what you are referring to.  If Moz redirected any URLs to the new "URLs" then they will be fine.  Could you be more specific?

[Kara.Wallace]

Hi Carla,

That is a crazy good question!

My thought process would be that if Google is smart enough to figure out a sentence like, "... SEOmoz specializes in tools for SEO..." that when it sees a sentence like, "... Moz, formerly SEOmoz, rebranded itself as an internet marketing..." it should be able to associate the change in name and area of specialty.

As far as redirecting, co-citation/co-occurrence aren't really redirecting anything. The theory behind it all is that if Google sees one site linking to two sites, that those two sites "probably" are similar to each other OR if text across the internet repeatedly says a company name with their specialty, that the company probably specializes in that area - if that makes sense.

Just my two cents... great question!

Mike

[Atlanta-SMO]

Well if Google is effectively using "Co-citation/Co-occurrence" then in the instance for Moz that you referred to above, they should be able to use the same process to adjust to the change in name.  Moz could help this process by making more references that SEOMOZ is now MOZ, etc...

Here is a good reference from MOZ owner Randy Fishkin: http://moz.com/blog/prediction-anchor-text-is-dying-and-will-be-replaced-by-cocitation-whiteboard-friday

[Atlanta-SMO]

To answer your question make sure that your client and it's social community make a "big deal" of the name change publicly in several ways on the internet so google can adjust.

[macdougall]

I know I'm resurrecting something pretty old but I've got a question along the same lines.

I know footer style credit links are supposed to be effectively pointless for link juice or whatever, but I'd have to imagine that credit links such as;

Web Design by Orange Digital

Serve as decent citations.

Now I just took over the SEO for this company who used to have a different name and have a lot of credit links that say;

Web Design by Former Company Name

My question is, is it worth going out of my way to alter the credit link to put an updated name in it for citation reasons? Keep in mind this niche does not have map listings activated in my area.

Cheers.