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Jul 15 2008
The Risks of Domain Rebranding
In his article “What’s in a name? Plenty in cyberspace” Patrick Kelley relates the story of The Karcher Group’s domain rebranding efforts. The story, not sensational at the first read, raises however important arguments, which inspired the topic of our blog entry today.
In actual fact, we talk too much about “how to choose” a domain name and never enough about “changing” a domain name. We talk too much about “branding domains” and never enough about “re-branding” them.
In the case of The Karcher Group the re-branding proved more costly than predicted. They paid 15000 USD to acquire tkg.com (which was their “dream domain”). However, the company started its internet presence with thekarchergroup.com – because tkg.com was taken 10 years ago. The domain became available at a reasonable price only in 2007, so the manager rushed into buying it.
Although in the end a smart move, the acquisition of tkg.com cost more than 15000 USD.
Ten years of educating customers and employees to use thekarchergroup.com as the corporate domain, thousands of bookmarks and web links were lost in the process. But the worst part came when the company found that tkg.com was banned from the search engines, because of previous abuse. Fortunately for The Karcher Group they had a good reputation, which helped the company regain the SE positioning for tgk.com.
To make a long story short: there’s a lot to learn from this lesson.
A company with TKG’s SEO experience and reputation goes over such hardships relatively easy – as they do all the SEO work in house, but a less experienced company with no SEO knowledge whatsoever will find the costs of domain re-branding unbearable. For bloggers – even a simple switch from a blogger or WordPress hosted subdomain to their own domain is often problematic. So before buying a domain name that was previously in use by other online entities, you should:
- check whether the domain is banned from the search engines
- make a budget for future costs: SEO, rebranding, advertising, newsletters and press releases announcing the change, etc
- don’t forget to redirect the old domain to the new domain and under no circumstances create a mirror of your already existing site on your new domain
Sia,
You’re absolutely right, we’re fortunate to have the resources in house to address the stumbling blocks we had. But many companies, bloggers etc, may not be in that same situation. We felt it was worth while to document and publicize this just in the interest of helping those either choosing to change domains, or forced to do so. Our hope is that the process can be made simpler for others by sharing both our experience and our mistakes.
Geoff Karcher | Jul 23, 2008 | Reply
Thanks for writing this – its great to get the word out about how hard it can be to change your domain.
Jennifer Geh | Jul 23, 2008 | Reply