Rebranding without wrecking your SEO: six domains measured

During a rebrand, the design rarely breaks. What breaks sits in the redirects, and almost always at a single point: where your old pages land. Send each old page to the successor of that page and your position moves with it. Send everything to the homepage and Google treats those redirects as a soft error, which means you start over on those addresses.

That sounds like a detail your agency handles. On 29 August 2026 we checked it on six Dutch domains belonging to companies that changed their name. On five of the six, every deep page of the old domain ends up on the new brand's homepage. One gets it right. These are not three-person webshops: the list includes Albert Heijn, T-Mobile and Nuon.

The rest of this article covers what exactly we measured, what Google writes about it, what a domain switch costs in traffic on average, and the order in which to handle it. With the figures and the commands, so you can check your own old domain in under a minute.

What actually breaks during a rebrand?

Your search position is attached to your addresses, not to your brand name. Every URL you have held for years carries links, click history and a place in the index. A rebrand changes that address, so you have to tell Google which new address is the successor of which old one. That is the whole job.

The mistake we see most often is a redirect set at domain level. Someone writes a server rule saying everything on oldbrand.com goes to newbrand.com, ticks it off, and moves on. Technically that works: your old visitors end up somewhere. They just all end up at the front door, including the ones looking for a product page, an article or a customer service page.

In its documentation on moving a site with URL changes, Google says to map old URLs to their new equivalents, update internal links and submit a new sitemap. Mapping means per page, not per domain. The moment the successor of a page is the homepage, your site is effectively saying that page no longer exists.

What does a domain switch cost in traffic?

More than most owners expect, and above all it lasts longer. Search Engine Journal collected data on 892 domain migrations and landed on an average of 523 days before the new domain matched the organic traffic of the old one. For 17% of those migrations, traffic had still not returned to the old level after a thousand days.

Those numbers have another side. The fastest recoveries in the same dataset took 19, 22, 23 and 33 days. The gap between three weeks and a year and a half is not luck, and it is not brand size. It comes down to whether the redirects are correct per page and whether you leave them in place long enough.

The earlier version of that research covered 171 migrations at an average of 229 days, with 42% never returning at all. The larger sample shows a longer average recovery but a much smaller share that stays down permanently. What holds in both versions: this is not a dip that clears in a couple of weeks.

What we measured on six old Dutch domains

We took six domains belonging to Dutch companies that changed their name and requested a deep page on each one, so not the homepage but a path like /contact or /klantenservice. Measured on 29 August 2026 with a normal browser header, recording only the redirect chain: which status code, and where you end up.

Five of the six send every deep path to the new brand's homepage. One gets it right. Delta Lloyd sends /contact through to the NN customer service page, including an anchor pointing at the Delta Lloyd section of that page. That is exactly what mapping per page means, and it takes the same afternoon of work as the alternative.

You can measure this on your own old domain. Request the chain with curl -sIL http://olddomain.com/an-old-path and look at two things: does it say 301 rather than 302, and does the final line land on a page that is genuinely the successor of what you asked for. That is all there is to it.

Why the homepage is the wrong answer

A redirect to the homepage destroys the reason someone landed on that page. They were looking for a specific product, a manual or a condition, and they get a start page where that answer is not. That visitor is gone, and you see it in your bounce rate long before you see it in your rankings.

It works the same way for Google. The search engine reads a redirect as a pointer to the successor of that document. If everything points at the same page there is no successor, and the old URL drops out of the index without anything replacing it. The links that pointed at that old page, which for a brand of any age are the most valuable ones you own, then point at an address that no longer means anything specific.

At Albert Heijn we saw a second layer on top of that. The chain runs from albertheijn.nl over http to ah.nl, then to https, then to www. Three steps where one would do. Google writes that Googlebot follows up to ten hops in a chain, but advises ideally no more than three and fewer than five. Three steps is not fatal, but it is unnecessary, and every extra step is a place where the next migration breaks.

The old name that simply keeps running

There is one more variant we came across, and it is more common than you would think: the old domain does not redirect at all but keeps running as a site of its own. On 29 August 2026, tele2.nl does not send you to Odido but to its own page titled to say that Tele2 is now Odido. The /contact path returns a 404 there.

As a temporary landing page that is defensible. You explain what happened, nobody is startled, and you keep control of the message. The problem is that the page then stays, and you end up with two sites about the same brand. Google has to choose which of the two answers a brand query, and the old name has years of authority and links on its side.

The result is that you compete with your own past. Your old domain ranks for your old name, your new domain has to build that name from zero, and the visitor searching for the old name lands on a dead end instead of your store. The fix is not complicated. Leave the explanation page up for a few months, then switch on the per-page redirects after all, so the old domain only forwards.

301 or 302: why that difference lingers

A 301 says permanent, a 302 says temporary. Google advises server-side permanent redirects where technically possible, so a 301 or a 308. With a temporary redirect the search engine allows for the old address coming back, so signals stay put instead of moving across.

This is not a theoretical distinction. T-Mobile Netherlands and Tele2 Mobiel continued as Odido on 5 September 2023, a name change affecting roughly eight million customers and 119 stores. When we requested t-mobile.nl on 29 August 2026, it still returned a 302. Almost three years after a permanent name change, a redirect is still telling Google this is temporary.

The practical rule is simple. A name change is permanent by definition, because a brand is more than the logo you replace and you are not going back halfway. What else is attached to a brand is covered in branding is not a logo. So every redirect that comes out of such a change is a 301. If you find a 302, it is nearly always a default setting in a hosting panel or a proxy that nobody has touched. Changing it costs no development time, only someone willing to look.

How long should you keep the old redirects?

At least a year. Google is explicit: keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least one year, because that period lets Google transfer all signals to the new URLs. That is a floor, not a target.

In practice there is rarely a good reason to remove them at all. A redirect rule costs nothing to maintain and the links to your old addresses do not disappear by themselves. Articles, mentions and references from before your rebrand stay up for decades. Every time someone clicks one, your redirect decides whether that person lands on the right page or on a front door where they were not headed.

What you do need to do again during a domain switch is the Change of Address request in Search Console. You only need it when moving from one domain or subdomain to another, so not for an http to https move, not for switching between www and non-www on the same domain, and not for moving paths within the same domain. If you are moving to a new name, submit a request for every verified variant of the old domain.

What your competitor does while you move

Your new name has no search history. On the day you announce it people start searching for it, and at that moment nothing of yours is there. That space does not stay empty.

Around the switch to Odido, KPN quickly published an article about the new name and took the top of the organic results for the question of what Odido is. A competitor answered the question the rebrand itself created, at the moment the query peaked.

There is a simple counter, and it costs an afternoon. Before the announcement, put a page live on your new domain explaining the new name, with the old name written out, because that is what people search for in those first weeks. Publish it the moment the news goes out, not after. And make sure your old domain can actually reach that page, because part of your audience starts at the address it already knew.

In what order do you handle it?

The order we work in is below. It is not about completeness but about where each step belongs, because three quarters of the damage happens when something lands after go-live that belonged before it.

Google adds that for small and medium sites you are best off moving all URLs at once, and that only larger sites should work in sections. For almost every webshop and brand in the Netherlands that means: in one go, well prepared, and not in stages where you lose the thread halfway.

According to the same documentation, most sites take a few weeks before Google starts showing the new addresses, and larger sites take longer. That is the period in which you should not start changing things because the numbers look disappointing.

What this means for your brand

A rebrand is nearly always a good decision that gets rushed on the technical side at the wrong moment. The design gets months, the name gets research, and the redirects get the last Friday afternoon before go-live. That balance does not match what is at stake, because the redirects decide whether years of built-up visibility come with you or stay behind.

So the technical side belongs on the table before the name is settled, not after. The list of existing addresses and their successors is an inventory you have to make anyway, and it often reveals which pages actually matter. In a brand refresh where the addresses stay the same this work does not exist, and all the attention can go to what your audience does notice. How to approach that without losing recognition is covered in rebranding without losing recognition.

If the rebrand comes with a new site, this work overlaps: the address list you build for the redirects is the same list you use to set up the new structure. How we approach that is under websites.

The check you can start with today takes a minute. Request an old, deep path from your previous domain and see where you end up. If you land on the homepage, you know where your traffic went. If you want to know what else sits under your brand in terms of visibility, look at our approach to branding and search engine optimisation.