Changing Brand and Domain Name - SEO Impacts

[piazza]

Hi everyone

I'm hoping a few of you can help me out...

We're an online-one retailer and we're currently looking at rebranding.
This is for commercial reasons:

• Our current name is difficult for customers to spell
• It's not wholly representative of what we now offer
• We want to push offline and social marketing to help increase or DA

In a nutshell, our current name implies 'cheap' and we're moving more upmarket.
Our DA is only 10, and a re-brand will make our brand more marketable.
A stronger brand and DA will help us climb up the rankings quickly - last year we ranked no 1 for a relatively competitive term before dropping a few places.

In terms of current traffic:

• 30% is via SEO (we have a low DA but rank ok for certain phrases)
• 70% is via adwords

We had our website redesigned last year and it performs well. 
The idea is to have a new brand logo and colours and move to a new domain.
We will keep all our existing products and content.

Please could anyone let me know the implications of this move?
What are potential pitfalls, and what will we need to do to alert Google?
I have read about 301 redirects, would these be required?

As always, any help is very much appreciated.

Many thanks

Abs

[Bigb06]

You must carefully prepare the migration :

• 301 all old urls to new ones, for example with htacess. To be sure, you can crawl your website for example with Xenu, and then test if all urls have been correctly redirected
• redirect email boxes
• list your top links with opensiteplorer and ask webmasters to change the links url

[Bryggselv.no]

Seems like there's a double post here, so I'll copy my answer from the other:

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Ok, so a few years ago, I helped a multinational/multidomain corporation with a massive restructuring of their IA and domain portfolio (a total of 21 websites in 15 languages).

You can read all about it here https://moz.com/blog/restructuring-your-website-and-how-to-minimize-traffic-loss

In short, what you wanna do is:

1. Create XML sitemap for old website
2. 301 each individual page from Old Domain to exactly or closest corresponding page on New Domain
3. Ping search engines from the old site with the old XML sitemap, so that they may as quickly as possible discover the move
4. Keep a close eye on Google Webmaster Tools for crawl/error messages and indexation issues
5. Track # of indexed pages on Old and New domain
6. Submit new XML sitemap from New Domain 2 weeks after launch
7. Also consider identifying your most important links via OSE or Majestic, and ask owners to update their links to the new domain.

Hope this helps

[piazza]

Hi Nicolas,

Thanks for your response. 
I'll read it in conjunction with any other posts and if I have any questions I'll be sure to come back to you!

Abs

[varun1800]

Hi Abs,

Changing brand and domain name are very crucial steps, so it requires proper attention and good strategy prior to the implementation. These changes can have the serious impact on the SEO work and branding you have ever done.

Below is the list of recommendation that you should follow:

1. Redirect all the old website URLs to the relevant URLs of the new website

2. Keep a close eye on Google webmaster to analyze and fix 404 errors

3. If you have subdomains linking to old website, redirect them to the new domain

4. Setup sitemap for your new domain

5. Do press release for your new brand so that visitors can know about the change

6. Perform Google Adwords for rebranding message like We have shifted to a new brand.

After following above steps, keep analysing your website to check the impact of domain change and rebranding on your website. So that you can fix the problems as soon as possible.

The real example of rebranding is Odesk, which has become Upwork now. You can get the detailed information of my mentioned point in the below link:

http://searchengineland.com/odesk-upwork-migrate-domain-not-kill-seo-223494

Hope this will help.

Regards,
Varun