I’m looking for anyone with any insights on what might happen to my brand in Google search results after a corporate rebrand…
Let’s say my brand is Foo, and I produce a widget with a legal name of “Foo Widget 1” on my website, Foo.com. Currently, when someone searches for “Foo” or for “Foo Widget 1,” we rank very high (obviously). We are rebranding to “Bar” and will be doing a massive overnight switchover from Foo.com to Bar.com, and the C levels don’t want to see very much “Foo” text on the Bar.com site. The site is staying the same (structure) and we have 301 redirects from, for example, foo.com/page1 to bar.com/page1 to preserve domain reputation. My biggest question is, once Bar.com goes live, and Google starts seeing those redirects and updating their content, how can we continue to somewhat preserve our rank or reputation for “Foo Widget 1” even though now the new pages will read “Bar Widget 1”…?
What are the best approaches for this…? We have talked about including some text on the product pages themselves that say “Bar Widget 1 was formerly known as Foo Widget 1”, but we really have to limit how much we reference “Foo”.
Thanks for any help provided, and thank you for dealing with my hypothetical example.
Hi dpagini, welcome to the forums,
ATM I can’t think of where I’ve seen them before, but I know I’ve seen “abc is now xyz” and “xyz previously known as abc” type messages before.
Seems to me if you want to “preserve our rank or reputation” you would want to do likewise.
Thank you Mittineague. At the moment, we will have “Foo was previously known as Bar” on every page of the site (in the header). That may help a little, but I’m not convinced that it would be the reason that a search for “Foo Widget 1” will take a user to the bar.com “Bar Widget 1” page.
You should also use Google Webmaster Tools to notify Google of your site’s “change of address”. Whether that will do much to help Google equate foo widget with bar widget, I don’t know, but it certainly can’t hurt. 
Thank you TechnoBear, definitely in the plans as well…
As of now, the best I can find is that “link juice” for the term “Foo Widget 1” will be our best equity for this transition. We would have sites all across the internet that still point to our site for information on “Foo Widget 1” - and those links will still exist after we change. As long as we are 301 redirecting, I suppose we’ll keep some of that reputation for the term and hopefully not lose too much traffic.
Any other thoughts or comments are more than welcome and helpful of course!