PSA: Don't Rebrand (If You Rely on Google for Traffic)
Our story:
In mid-November, I rebranded our company from RepeaterStore.com to Waveform.com.
Why? We’ve been RepeaterStore since we first started the company back in 2007. The industry has moved to calling the devices well sell “boosters." And a big part of our business is now installing Distributed Antenna Systems in larger buildings.
I spoke it over with our team and got buy-in. I explained the risks as I understood them: from every piece of guidance I’d read, we'd expect a significant loss in traffic, but a relatively quick recovery over the course of 2-3 months.
We checked to make sure our new domain had a clean history. We set up 301 redirects from every URL on RepeaterStore to our new domain. Everything on our backend stayed the exact same, as did our overall URL structure. We ran crawl tests. We followed every piece of guidance that Google provides for moving domains, including submitting via their “Change of Address Tool.”
The loss in rankings happened immediately: the next day, we lost 65% of our referral traffic from Google.
We waited 90 days, expecting our traffic to begin to recover. But there wasn’t even the slightest bump.
We reached out to SEO consultants. Had we done something wrong? They found some minor issues, but nothing that wasn’t also an issue on our old site.
It’s now been 170 days. Our traffic remains 65% lower than before we changed our domain. Things may rebound at some point. But I can’t continue to wait for that to happen.
As time has gone on, I’ve learned that Google’s algorithm simply doesn’t "understand" when a company rebrands. Their Change of Address" Tool is meant to help. But it’s far from being a panacea.
If you’re considering a rebrand and rely on traffic from Google: please heed this warning. Don't do it.