Forums Forums White Hat SEO Company Name Change – SEO Impact, Backlinks etc.

  • Company Name Change – SEO Impact, Backlinks etc.

    Posted by seohelper on March 22, 2021 at 7:57 pm

    Hi All,

    I will need to change my company name (and domain) within the next 90 days or so (unfortunately unavoidable). I’m trying to get a general sense of the overall impact, both short-term and long-term. The domain is almost 2 years old with about 400 referring domains / 1.3k backlinks / 700+ keywords (Ahrefs). We’re currently ranking on page one (if not position ~1) for the majority of our highly targeted keywords (in a pretty competitive space). I understand that I can be very diligent about redirect mapping, but from the experts, what should I expect? I assume I could have a few months of a serious drop, and some potentially permanent side effects, but not entirely clear what they could be. The 2 years of branding work is definitely taking a hit…

    I appreciate your help and expertise!

    icpooreman replied 3 years ago 1 Member · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • sleepybull74

    Guest
    March 23, 2021 at 12:07 am

    If you migrate the content and 301 redirect the URL’s getting traffic to the new ones, the drop won’t be too bad, if there’s any at all. I’d bet you keep at least 80% if you do it all correctly. I’d also update the top performing pages informationally if possible and with visual assets to help it thrive in a move.

  • threedogdad

    Guest
    March 23, 2021 at 1:20 pm

    301 everything 1:1, but do NOT rely on redirects. Redirects are a band-aid for the links you can’t get updated. Get any/all links you can updated to the new location. This means all internal links and at a minimum your most important external links. The externals will likely be difficult, but you can narrow it down to the most important and also accept that a few wins are better than none. I’d also recommend the opposite of sleepybull – change *nothing* other than what must be changed for the move. If you change anything else you’ll never know what it was that impacted your performance (good or bad). Migrations/rebranding should be done in as much isolation as possible so you have the best understanding of what happened.

  • icpooreman

    Guest
    March 23, 2021 at 5:49 pm

    I switched my personal blog to be a personal brand a couple months ago. Doesn’t sound like my site’s as big as yours as I was only getting like 15k sessions a month at the time.

    I 301 re-directed everything. Informed Google in the search console. Had two pretty tense weeks as my traffic cut in less than half. But then a couple weeks later traffic was higher than ever.

    Not a guarantee that’s how it’ll work out for you. But a real-life case study from somebody who recently did it.