On Google UK "rebranding" is searched 2,900 times a month. "Website migration SEO" 260 times, "change domain" 70. People who change their name think about the logo, the signage, the press release. The SEO side comes later, often once the new site is already live and traffic has started to fall.
That's where the biggest risk lies, and the numbers show it. Twitter moved its site to x.com on 17 May 2024: in the UK "twitter" is still searched 4.09 million times a month, "x.com" 74,000. Abbey's branches started becoming Santander on 11 January 2010, and "abbey national" still gets 3,600 searches a month.
In a rebrand the old name stays a keyword for years. The checklist is there to move the URLs, but above all to stop those searches going to someone else.
Below are the checks in time order: before the change, on the day, and in the weeks after. They apply if you're changing your domain along with your name. If the domain stays the same (a redesign, in practice), the part that concerns you is the one on the old name.
Before the change, the work is the inventory
A redirect takes a minute to write. A complete URL map takes days, and it's what decides how the migration goes.
- Crawl the current site with a crawler (Screaming Frog, Sitebulb or Semrush's) and save the list of URLs that return a 200, including PDFs and images that get visits.
- Export the Performance report from Search Console by page and by query. It's your snapshot of the before, and without it you can't compare anything afterwards.
- Pull your backlinks with Ahrefs, Semrush or Search Console's Links report and sort pages by the number of domains linking to them.
- Build the map: one row for each old URL, with the equivalent new URL next to it. Google puts it plainly: "Don't redirect many old URLs to one irrelevant single URL destination, such as the home page of the new site."
- Prepare two XML sitemaps, one with the old URLs and one with the new. You'll use them to measure the move; more on that below.
- Renew the old domain for several years and switch on auto-renewal. If it expires, the redirects disappear and the domain goes back on the market.
- Register the variants of the new name (.co.uk, .com, .uk, with and without a hyphen) before the public announcement.
Pages with no equivalent on the new site have to be decided one by one. If there's a page close in topic, a 301 to that. If there isn't, a 404 or a 410. Sending everything to the homepage is the shortcut Google's documentation asks you to avoid.
On the day, you need page-by-page 301 redirects
A 301 tells Google the move is permanent and passes the signals to the new URL. It has to be set up on the server (.htaccess, Nginx, CDN rules), not with JavaScript or a meta refresh. How to write one in each environment is covered in our guide to the 301 redirect.
- Every old URL points straight to the new one, with no steps in between. Googlebot follows up to 10 hops in a chain, but every extra hop is wasted crawling and one more place where something can break.
- All variants of the old domain (http, https, with and without www) reach the final URL in a single hop.
- Every new page has a self-referencing canonical. If the site is multilingual, the hreflang annotations point to the new addresses.
- Internal links point to the new URLs. Leaving them on the old ones forces every click and every crawl through the redirect.
- The new domain's robots.txt doesn't block anything and no page carries the staging environment's noindex. It's a trivial mistake, and on its own it's enough to make a site vanish from Google.
- The new server can handle more requests than usual: during the move Google crawls more often.
Before the site goes public, test a sample: the URLs with the most traffic and those with the most backlinks. Screaming Frog's list mode or a simple curl shows you the response code and the destination. If the site carries technical SEO problems with it (existing chains, parameters, duplicate pages), the migration is the time to fix them, not to move them to the new domain.
Search Console: use Change of Address once, in the right order
The Change of Address tool in Google Search Console tells Google that the old domain has become the new one. The tool's official documentation sets a few conditions:
- you must be an owner of both properties, with the same Google account;
- the 301s must already be live, at least from the old homepage to the new one;
- it only works on domain-level properties and doesn't move subfolders such as example.co.uk/shop;
- it doesn't move subdomains: www, m. or language versions have to be migrated one at a time.
Once the change is submitted, Google shows the notice for 180 days and during that period shifts crawling to the new site. The tool isn't for moving from http to https or between www and non-www: redirects are enough there.
On the same day, submit the sitemap of new URLs in the new property and the sitemap of old URLs in the old property. Google Search Central's guide to site moves explains why: at the start the new sitemap will have zero indexed pages and the old one plenty. Watching them swap over tells you where you are.
Bing Webmaster Tools has an equivalent tool, Site Move. In the UK Bing had 6.08% of searches in September 2026 (StatCounter), and the procedure takes a few minutes.
People keep searching for the old name for years
This is where almost every migration guide stops. On 10 October 2026 we read the UK pages that rank for "website migration seo" (boxChilli, Our Name is Mud, Edge45): they cover URLs, redirects and backlinks, and none of them deals with the old name. In a rebrand the technical part is half the job. The other half is the people who keep typing the old name.
| Brand | What changed | When | Searches/month, old name | Searches/month, new name |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Twitter → X | domain, from twitter.com to x.com | 17 May 2024 | 4,090,000 ("twitter") | 74,000 ("x.com") |
| ITV Hub → ITVX | name of the streaming service | 8 December 2022 | 60,500 | 1,000,000 |
| Abbey → Santander | bank rebranded by its new owner | 11 January 2010 | 3,600 ("abbey national") | 1,830,000 |
ITV announced in November 2022 that ITVX would replace ITV Hub from 8 December. Almost four years later, about one search in 18 still uses the old name, and 1,300 people a month still look for "itv hub login". For Abbey, which disappeared from the high street more than 15 years ago, 3,600 searches a month remain, plus 1,600 for "abbey national online banking".
For a small business it's the same thing on a smaller scale. If you change your name, you have to decide where those searches land:
- Keep the old name on the new site for at least a year: on the About page, in the footer ("formerly Old Name") and on a dedicated page that tells the story of the change.
- Add the previous name to your Organization structured data with the alternateName property.
- Update your Google Business Profile. Google warns that if you change your business name after it's verified, "you might need to verify your business again": put it in the diary for the day the new name goes up on your signage and website, not a week later.
- Change the name, website and logo on your directory listings and social profiles, starting with the ones that appear on the first page when you search for the old name.
- Compare the old and new names every month on Google Trends. When the lines cross, the new name has caught on.
Your best backlinks need fixing by hand
A 301 passes on the value of links, but it adds a step that only works as long as the old domain stays live. The same Google guide advises contacting the sites that link to your content and asking them to update their links.
From the list you pulled before the change, take the most authoritative domains and those that send real visits: trade associations, local papers, suppliers, customers, universities. It's usually a few dozen emails. They pay off better than a link building campaign started from scratch, because the link already exists and only needs correcting. And a new name is news: a well-written press release brings in new links too.
The first eight weeks tell you whether the migration worked
Google says that for a small to medium-sized site "a few weeks" is a general rule for most pages to move, and that visibility in Search may fluctuate temporarily in the meantime. The hard part is telling a fluctuation from damage. What to watch, and how often:
- Every day in the first week: 404 and 5xx errors in the server logs and the Page indexing report, and redirects that lead to the wrong page.
- Every week: indexed pages in the new sitemap against the old one; clicks on the new property added to those on the old one, compared with the same weeks before the change.
- Every week: queries with the old name and queries with the new name in the Performance report. The old name must keep leading to your site, not to a directory or a competitor.
- After two months: a full SEO audit of the new site, with the URL map as a reference.
The redirects stay. Google asks you to keep them "for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year". It's better to keep them with no end date: they cost almost nothing and old links keep circulating in emails, PDFs, signatures and articles from years ago.
If you'd rather listen: Google's Martin Splitt and Glenn Gabe talk through site migrations and the mistakes that come up most often.
Further reading: how to build an SEO strategy for the new site, once the migration is done.
Frequently asked questions
There's usually a temporary dip. Google warns that visibility in Search may fluctuate during the move and that a small to medium-sized site generally takes a few weeks. If traffic hasn't come back after two months, look first at the redirect map and at blocked pages.
Google recommends keeping them for as long as possible, generally at least one year. It's better to keep them with no end date and to keep renewing the old domain, because old links keep circulating for years.
No. It's only for when you change domain or subdomain, for example from example.co.uk to example.com. For moving from http to https, or between www and non-www, 301 redirects are enough.
Google shows the notification and forwards signals from the old site to the new one for 180 days. The redirects must stay live after that date too.
For years. In the UK "itv hub" still gets 60,500 searches a month almost four years after ITVX replaced it, and "abbey national" 3,600 more than 15 years after Abbey became Santander (DataForSEO data, October 2026).
Where to start
Open Search Console, go to Performance and filter for queries that contain your company's current name. Add up the clicks for the last 12 months: that's the traffic that comes to you only because someone knows your name, and it's what the new name will have to win back. Write that number down before you sign off the rebrand and compare against it every week after the change.
If you'd like someone to handle the URL map, redirects and monitoring, our SEO service covers migrations too. Get in touch before you change domain, not after.
