Remake Your Site or Revise Your URL for Reputation Rehabilitation

A question surrounding SEO and changing the main URL recently came up on a forum. An owner of a business had an established website that was ranking well for their main URL. The owner had decided to completely remake their website and change the current URL to one that related to their business. The old domain contained a keyword that no longer reflected their business.

Combating Negative SEO

In this case, they wanted to remove a specific word from the URL. The owner thought it would have negative consequences to the website by changing to a brand-new domain name and wondered if anything could be done to offset this negative aspect. Here are the ideas that came up in the comments section:

Changing URL and Remaking the Site

The strongest factor that people in the comments section pointed out was the negative aspect of trying to remake the site and change the URL at the same time. The consensus was to do these two moves separately. The thought was that Google would have a hard enough time adjusting to the remake of the site. If product lines changed, Google bots would need to totally reindex this area. If the URL changed at the same time, it might be too confusing for Google to handle.

The Site Rehaul Is Complex

A few individuals thought that the site rehaul should be completed first. This would give Google enough time to adjust to that change. After the recall, the owner could redirect traffic from the old URL to the new domain name and that there wouldn't be much of an impact from changing the URL. One commenter reminded the owner to correctly set up a 302 redirect for the URL change, and one person thought it was not a good idea at all -- it took years to build rank and that would be destroyed by using a new domain.

What do you think?