How to change your domain name in a rebrand without losing SEO

The move at a glance

Gissi Music Academy is a music school in Bogotá that teaches online and at students' homes. Until October 2026 it was called A medio tono, at amediotonomusic.com. Dardo designed and built its website and ran the rebrand, including the move to gissimusic.com (case study). What follows comes from our migration plan, the redirect map, the checks we ran and Search Console.

It covers what is specific to changing the domain inside a rebrand. For the steps every migration shares, see our website migration SEO checklist. If you haven't decided whether the name should change at all, start with rebrand vs brand refresh.

Brand first, then the domain

Google's guide to site moves says "Change only one thing at a time." Its example moves the domain first and changes the layout after. What matters is the sequence, not which change leads.

We put the brand first, for two reasons. A name change on the old domain can be undone in an afternoon; a domain move can't, because browsers and Google remember permanent redirects. And the new domain only makes sense once the site wears the new name: people sent to gissimusic.com shouldn't land on a page that still says A medio tono.

Phase 1 changed everything that names the business, on the old domain:

• The full name, Gissi Music Academy, in the home page title, og:site_name and the WebSite and Organization structured data, with Gissi as the short form in page titles and copy.
• The former names ("A medio tono", "A ½ tono", "A 1/2 tono") kept in alternateName, which Google's Organization markup documentation describes as "Another common name that your organization goes by." It costs one line and ties the old name to the new one.
• The logo, icons and default share image, generated from one source file.
• About 920 interface messages in Spanish, English and Portuguese, and the sender name on the form emails.

Our plan said to wait a week or two after phase 1, until traffic looked steady, before moving the domain. In the end both phases shipped on 23 October, less than two hours apart. Each passed its checks before the next began, but it means the search data further down can't separate the effect of the new name from that of the new domain. If you can afford the wait, take it.

Park the new domain with a temporary redirect

Between buying the new domain and switch day, it has to answer something. From 7 October, gissimusic.com answered with a 307 to the same page and query string on the old site, set up as a Cloudflare redirect rule. Temporary on purpose:

• Google's redirects documentation says "Use permanent redirects when you're sure that the redirect won't be reverted." This one was going to be reversed within weeks.
• The HTTP standard, RFC 9110, says "A 301 response is heuristically cacheable," so a browser can keep following one without asking the server again. A browser holding a cached 301 from gissimusic.com to the old site would loop once the old site started redirecting back. After a 307, the client "ought to continue using the original target URI."

That sets the first step of switch day: turn the temporary redirect off before the old domain starts redirecting to the new one, or the two domains send visitors back and forth. We disabled the rule instead of deleting it, so a rollback could switch it back on. And because Cloudflare applied the rule before the site's own code, we could attach gissimusic.com to the site ahead of time without visitors seeing any change.

Build the redirect map from every source, not just the sitemap

A redirect map is only as good as its list of old addresses, and each source misses something. Gissi's combined four. The figures are from the map rebuilt on 23 October:

Each of the 4,379 addresses appears in four forms, http and https, with and without www: 17,516 rows. Every row holds the old URL, the new URL, the status code, clicks and impressions over 16 months, and a priority. The 245 high-priority addresses (those with a click, at least 100 impressions, or a role like the home page or the sitemap) carried all 450 clicks of those 16 months, and the post-switch check runs them first.

Rebuild the map on switch day. Between 12 and 23 October, pages were added, merged and retired, and the map went from 4,433 to 4,379 addresses. Our redirect map generator does a first pass from two sitemaps; Search Console and your own files fill the gaps.

One hop from every form of every old address

Google's guide advises "redirecting to the final destination directly." In a domain move that is always possible: whatever answers the old domain can look up the final address. The rules in Gissi's map:

• Same path and query string on the new domain, unless the page itself had moved.
• Old redirects resolved in the same hop. A renamed teacher profile, a retired French page, a trailing slash or an old /es/ prefix goes straight to the final page, not through the old redirect first.
• 308 for form posts and the site's MCP endpoint. RFC 9110 notes that after a 301 "a user agent MAY change the request method from POST to GET"; a 308 keeps the method and the data being sent.
• One canonical host. We chose gissimusic.com without www: it's what people say and print, and typing it costs no extra redirect. www.gissimusic.com redirects to it.

What the live redirects answered when we checked them with curl on 29 October 2026:

The piano page answered 200 on gissimusic.com and named itself as canonical, with hreflang links to its English and Portuguese versions on the same domain.

A script checked the map twice. Before the switch, it confirmed that every sitemap and Search Console URL was in the map in all four forms, and ran the real redirect code against every row. After the switch, it requested every old address live: each had to answer one 301 to exactly its row's target, and each new address had to answer 200, name itself as canonical, be open to crawlers and carry hreflang on the new domain. On 23 October it passed for all 17,516 old URLs and 3,954 new ones.

Edge cases the map didn't catch on its own

Files the site's code never sees

Gissi's site runs on Cloudflare Workers. For speed, four folders (build files, hero images, fonts and teacher photos) are served straight from Cloudflare's asset store: by default, Workers static assets "will serve any static asset matching a request" without running the code. So the code's redirect never saw those requests. A redirect rule on the old domain's Cloudflare zone sends those folders to gissimusic.com. If your platform serves files from a CDN, a storage bucket or another host, those URLs move too, and images can carry image-search traffic.

"Always Use HTTPS" adds a hop

Cloudflare's Always Use HTTPS "redirects all your visitor requests from http to https." On the old domain, that turned an old http:// link into two hops: first to https on the old domain, then to gissimusic.com. We turned it off on the old domain only, so http requests reach the site's own redirect and go to https://gissimusic.com in one; it stays on for the new domain. Any "force HTTPS" or "force www" setting on the old domain's host or CDN does the same.

www, the bare domain and Change of Address

Google's Change of Address help says the tool "does not move any subdomains below the specified domain (including www)." The old site lived at www.amediotonomusic.com, and the verified property was the domain property amediotonomusic.com. So we added a URL-prefix property for https://www.amediotonomusic.com/ and ran Change of Address twice, from each property to gissimusic.com.

The tool needs the same Google account to own both the old and new properties, and a 301 from the old home page to the new one. Google then prioritizes crawling the new site and forwards signals for 180 days.

Every self-reference from one setting

Canonicals, hreflang, the sitemap, Open Graph images, structured data, the RSS feed, robots.txt, llms.txt and the Markdown copies for AI tools, the IndexNow key location and the forms' sender address all read the domain from one setting. A test build with the switch on had no link to the old domain in 2,144 pages or in any feed. If yours are spread across templates, plugins and CMS fields, find them all before switch day: a canonical left on the old domain tells Google the opposite of your redirects.

The forms' sending domain

Gissi's forms send email from an address on the site's domain, through Cloudflare's email service. Switching the domain meant setting gissimusic.com up as a sending domain first: on 23 October it got its bounce subdomain, DKIM key and a DMARC record matching the old domain's. Skip that and the switch quietly breaks the forms, the part of the site that brings in students. Submit every form after the switch and check that the email arrives, and not in spam.

URL changes after the move

On 24 October, the day after the move, the English and Portuguese pages got addresses in their own words: /en/herramientas/metronomo became /en/tools/metronome. The old domain's rows for those pages were updated in the same release, so they still take one hop. It was also a second change in one week, which Google's one-change-at-a-time advice argues against. Whenever a URL changes on the new site later, update the old domain's map too, or each change adds a hop.

Places outside the website

• Google Business Profile. Its guidelines say not to provide "URLs that redirect," so the website field changes to the new domain on switch day. The name follows Google's own rules: an existing profile can be renamed only for limited changes, and otherwise "it's considered a new business." Our rebrand launch checklist covers those rules.
• Profiles and listings: social bios, WhatsApp Business, directories and partner pages that link to you.
• Integrations: webhooks and callbacks registered on the old domain. Point them at the new one instead of counting on them to follow redirects.
• Analytics: tools registered per hostname need the new domain added, or its visits won't show.

Bing and IndexNow

Bing's 2020 migration guide says the old domain's redirects "need to remain live for at least 1 to 2 years, preferably longer," and to report the move with its Site Move tool. When we prepared Gissi's move, on 12 October 2026, we couldn't find that tool in Bing Webmaster Tools. Instead we submitted the new sitemap there, and the deploy that turned the switch on sent every new URL through IndexNow, which shares submissions with the other participating search engines. IndexNow ties a key to the host its key file sits on; once the old domain's key file redirected too, only the new URLs could be submitted.

Switch day, in order

1. Rebuild the map from the live site and run the pre-switch check.
2. Write down the deployed versions of the site, so a rollback is one command.
3. Disable the temporary redirect on the new domain.
4. Turn on the old domain's redirects. On Gissi's site that was one setting, deployed by the normal build.
5. Add the redirect rule for files the code never sees, and turn off Always Use HTTPS on the old domain.
6. Run the post-switch check: high-priority rows first, then every row.
7. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and send the new URLs through IndexNow.
8. Submit every form and check that the email arrives.
9. Run Change of Address from every old property.
10. Change the Business Profile website, social bios and listings.

Keep the old domain for good

Our advice to Gissi was to keep amediotonomusic.com registered and redirecting indefinitely, and to renew it for several years now or move it to the registrar that holds the new domain, so no renewal slips. It costs little. A lapsed domain can be bought by someone else, along with every link that still points to it. Keep the old Search Console property too, and look at it once a month. If you're budgeting a rebrand, the domain and the redirects belong in the rollout costs.

The first days after Gissi's move

Search Console splits a domain move into two properties, so add them together. These are the daily figures for both, pulled on 29 October 2026. Search Console days are in Pacific time, and 28 October was still incomplete.

What it shows: in the four complete days after the switch (24 to 27 October), the two properties together got 504 clicks, 126 a day, against 84 a day in the two weeks before, and 20,914 impressions a day against 13,338. The new property's share of impressions grew from 3% on 24 October to 13% on 27 October. Google was still showing mostly the old addresses, and the people who clicked them reached gissimusic.com through the 301s.

What it doesn't show: that the move is finished, or that it helped. Four days is too short. Impressions were already climbing before the move, from 9,946 on 9 October to 16,293 on 22 October, because the site's search traffic was only weeks old. The same week also brought new class pages, merged blog posts and the new English and Portuguese addresses. So far there is no drop, and that is all these numbers support.

What to watch in weeks 1 to 8

Daily in the first week, then weekly until week 8:

• Performance, with both properties added together, compared with the two weeks before the switch rather than long-term totals.
• The Pages report. Indexed pages rise on the new property; on the old one, "Page with redirect" rises. Both are good signs.
• Crawl stats on the new property.
• The redirect check on the high-priority rows on days 1, 3 and 7.

Our plan's rules for acting the same day:

• Any failure in the redirect check, or form emails that stop arriving.
• Server errors (5xx) or redirect errors in Search Console.
• The new property still near zero impressions after 7 days.
• Combined clicks down more than 50% for 7 days in a row, against the two weeks before.
• Many new pages reported as duplicates where Google chose a canonical on the old domain.
• After 4 weeks, most impressions still on the old property.

If something is clearly broken on the day, roll back the deploy, revert the switch, remove the old domain's extra rules and cancel Change of Address, which Google allows within 180 days. Keep the new domain attached and serving the site: browsers remember 301s, and anyone who followed one during the switch will keep going there. Weeks later, a dip in traffic is not a reason to move back. Moving back is a second move, and the clock starts again.

Getting help with a rebrand or a domain move

Dardo's rebranding work ends with the rollout, and when the name changes, that includes the domain. A website migration without a rebrand follows the same map and checks. See the Gissi case study, or tell us what you're moving.