Brand name change impact on SEO: “Hi folks, I run a small business with a big commerce store and I have a question about best practices for changing names of products so it doesn’t hurt SEO. This week, a major brand name in my industry reversed course on a decision they made in 2021 to disallow the use of their name when selling their products. Their 2021 decision almost put us out of business, but we rebranded the products and promoted the heck out of our new brand. Now we can use their brand name again.
They are a massive global name that you’ve probably heard of, so keeping our own brand isn’t the best option. I have over 800 product listings that are going to change names. What’s the best practice for how to deal with URLs? Keep the old name and deal with the mismatch or change the URL and set up 800 plus redirects.”
It sounds like they’re saying that they now can use the name again, so I guess they changed it and then they have to change it back now. Personally, I would just change it back to the original because if they have years and years and years of SEO work and all that done, it’s going to be a lot easier to just go back to the original and undo anything they did to go to that new one that they’re no longer going to use or they could. That’s just my opinion.
It’s always a lot easier to clean up a few months of new work than years of old work yeah but for the sake of for just the fun of it let’s say you’re in this position and you actually can’t use the name yeah for best practice Zach go what would you do yeah so you’re using um you’re selling kleenex tissues and then kleenex says you can’t use their name in your in your thing so you rename them to “Dirty X”.
Right? Get it? Get it? Dirty X tissues? Yeah, I mean, that honestly sounds like that’s what happened originally with this guy. And he couldn’t see the future, so he didn’t leave himself a way to just quickly revert all that. So once they reversed their decision to go back to Kleenex, he couldn’t just flip a switch and just point everything back. Really, yeah. Best practice would be to go the redirect route.
It’s not really something that needs to take a ton of work. Like we talked about this a little bit before where that’s like something that you can use AI for is to kind of help automate busy work like that. And that’s something you can probably go through and just do a ton of redirects. It’s not something you need to spend three weeks on redirecting 800 different product pages for. Yeah, I would actually just say go go into Claude.
I’m going to say this for WordPress. I’m sure it works the same for other platforms. But if you have to do hundreds of redirects, go into cloud and just say cloud, download the XML sitemap from your site. If you don’t know how to do that, just Google, you know, how do I find my XML sitemap for WordPress? You’ll copy that URL. You’ll say cloud analyze this URL. And I want to create redirects and I need you to, you know, essentially you can put in the variables so you can say all the
pages that say Kleenex-1.html or whatever. I mean, that’s not going to be their extension, but let’s just say now it’s DirtyX-1.html and then say create it as a plugin so I can upload it into my site and voila, it’ll dump out a plugin, upload it, and you should be good to go. So just do like a custom plugin like that and it’ll save you hours, days maybe, depending on if you have 800 products, days. It’ll save you days.
Good use for AI, right? Like an actual good use for AI. That’s what AI is for, is to automate busy work. It’s to save time not to be the brains behind your operation and do creative work. Once you know your plan, use it to execute your plan. Do not ever use it to give you the plan. Because you and a thousand other people will have been given the same plan and then you’ll be like “why doesn’t this work?”, and it’s because AI is pulling from the same data base for somebody else.
