I have a customer who's company has changed names from CompanyX to BusinessY. Their domain is companyx.com, and have registered their new domain, businessy.com, with a CNAME to companyx.com.Would it be better from an SEO perspective to have it the other way around; have businessy.com as the main domain and companyx.com as a CNAME?The site is new but the content is almost identical, except that all occurrences of CompanyX have been changed to BusinessY.
With a new company name, is it better to switch domains or use an alias from an SEO perspective?
seo;domains
I'm not sure how the CNAME factors into the equation, unless you're using a subdomain and need to direct traffic for that. What you want to consider is where to do the 301 redirect from and to:This depends on if companyx.com is listed in search engines, and if you want to maintain your search engine results for that. If so, you would want to do a 301 redirect from that domain to the new domain, since your content will reflect the new name and you likely don't want to confuse visitors, as well as to start building recognition for the new company name and domain.Follow the steps here to aid with this: Google Webmaster Tools: Moving your site