Renaming a company or refreshing a brand often means moving the website to a new domain. The biggest fear is that rankings earned over years will vanish overnight. In practice, a well-planned migration usually causes a temporary wobble before rankings transfer to the new domain. Mistakes, especially moving without redirects or with the wrong ones, can depress traffic for a long time.
Preparing before the move
A migration starts with a full inventory of the old site, not with buying the new domain. List all important pages, categories, blog posts and the external links pointing to them, using your sitemap and reports from Google Search Console and Yandex Webmaster. Knowing which pages bring the most traffic is essential for checking the result later. Also check whether the new domain was used before, since a past spam history can hurt its reputation, and have SSL, hosting and email ready in advance.
Example: a furniture shop gets a new name
Picture a furniture shop in Tashkent that has operated at eski-brend.uz for years and is rebranding as yangibrend.uz. It has hundreds of product pages, many bringing buyers from search. What matters most is that a buyer following an old link lands on that same sofa or table, not an error page.
301 redirects: the foundation
A 301 code tells search engines a page has moved permanently, passing its accumulated link value to the new URL. A temporary 302 or a JavaScript redirect does not do this reliably. The key rule is that every old page must point to its matching page on the new domain, not everything to the homepage. On Apache, with an unchanged URL structure, these rules in the old domain's .htaccess are enough:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?eski-brend\.uz$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://yangibrend.uz/$1 [R=301,L]On Nginx, create a separate server block for the old domain. It needs a valid SSL certificate too, or browsers will show a security error before the redirect happens.
server {
listen 80;
listen 443 ssl;
server_name eski-brend.uz www.eski-brend.uz;
# ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key lines go here
return 301 https://yangibrend.uz$request_uri;
}If page paths change as well, add specific mappings before the general rule:
RewriteRule ^mahsulotlar/(.*)$ https://yangibrend.uz/katalog/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^biz-haqimizda/?$ https://yangibrend.uz/kompaniya [R=301,L]Testing the redirects
Check your top traffic pages one by one. Each request should reach the correct new URL in a single 301 step. Chains such as HTTP to HTTPS, then to non-www, then to the new domain slow things down and weaken the signal. The last command shows every hop; ideally you see one 301 followed by a 200 on the new domain.
curl -I http://eski-brend.uz/katalog/divanlar
curl -I https://www.eski-brend.uz/aloqa
curl -sIL https://eski-brend.uz/katalog/divanlar | grep -i -E "^(HTTP|location)"What to update on the new domain
- Canonical tags, internal links and image URLs should point to the new domain.
- Submit a new sitemap to the search engine consoles.
- Verify both domains in Google Search Console and use the Change of Address tool; notify Yandex Webmaster of the move as well.
- Update analytics, ad campaigns, map listings and social media profiles.
- Ask partners who link to you to update the most important links.
Never let the old domain go
The most common mistake is failing to renew the old domain a few months later. Redirects only work while it is alive. If it expires, every old external link breaks and someone else may grab it to exploit your brand's traffic. Keep it for years, ideally permanently, with auto-renewal on. Do not delete old mailboxes right away either: set up forwarding to the new addresses and an auto-reply with the new address. Keeping both domains in one sayt.uz account makes redirects and renewals easier to control.
What to watch in the following weeks
Some ranking fluctuation in the first weeks is normal while search engines re-index the new URLs. Review indexing and error reports regularly; a rise in 404 errors means some pages lack redirects. Compare traffic on key pages with the pre-migration period, and if certain pages do not recover after several weeks, recheck their redirect, canonical tag and content match.