Changing Company Name.. will it affect Search Engine rankings?

Hello,

I'm quite new to web design and SEO in general.

Basically, my boss has asked me to go through the existing company website and change all instances of the company name from 'example1 & Co ltd' to example1/example2'

In other words, replacing the '& Co LTD' with the name of the product we sell.

I'm worried that doing this might impact negatively on search engine rankings. Would the company name 'example & co LTD' be a commonly recognised key phrase that, if altered, would drop us down in google, yahoo, etc?

Any help appreciated!

Cheers

are you changing the title of the document, page, h1 heading, etc, etc?? are you trying to change the actual URL?? Either way, making changes does affect SEO... If the site is optimized for a certain keyword phrase then this would change the percentages and algorithms that googlebots look for... Some changes have a minor affect and some have a major affect, just all depends....

Changes can be good for a site too.... Google likes fresh and relevant content. Like I said, all changes affect SEO but might be in a good way....

let us know what exactly you are changing...

Hi Lukc22,

Thanks for the reply.

The site is quite old and based on html templates/tables. I'm doing a visual 'patch up' job on it until we can get it overhauled.

As part of this, i've got to go through all the textual content on the site including articles, product descriptions, 'about' and 'history' sections etc and modify the company name every time it appears. The first part of the name remains the same in each instance, but the second part changes.

The URL will not change, but I will be changing the name in the header jpg of the master template, which has lots of tags attached, including the words that I am about to add. I'm not sure if i'm changing the h1 heading. Where would I find this in the code?

I hope this all makes sense.

Thanks.

Unless the name of the company is your main keyword, then you should be fine... The googlebots really care about keyword density and content relevance... And you are merely switching one relevant word for another.... Now if your main keyword is "purple umbrellas" and the company name was Purple Umbrellas inc and changed to Purple Pencils inc, then you have a problem....

You may want to look at updated most of the text as well to add fresh content if its been awhile...

Sounds like a job for a robust text editor with directory-wide search/replace.

If you leave the company name on the about us page, or some place, that should do the trick. I wouldn't worry too much about SEO. To me, it sounds like a step forward in SEO. Customers tend to remember product names more readily than company names.

The change will have more of an effect at Yahoo and Bing than Google.

It might affect you a little bit if at all but nothing detrimental

Changing the title tag will definitely affect the search engine rankings. But expect to get your ranking back after a few days or weeks.

At the begin it will make a difference for sure, but you can over come it with time

be sure to setup redirects if the page url changes