New Name. New Domain. Same SEO. Actually, Better.

When oDesk rebranded as Upwork and moved to a brand-new domain, LSG ran the SEO side of the switch. Organic traffic and conversions grew instead of crashing.

Primary goalRebrand oDesk as Upwork and move to a brand-new domain without losing organic traffic
EngagementLaunched May 5, 2015
5 daysfor rankings to bounce back above pre-launch levels after a post-launch dip

About Upwork

Upwork, formerly oDesk, is one of the world’s largest freelance marketplaces, connecting businesses with independent professionals around the globe.

Why they hired us

A new name meant a new domain, and domain migrations have a habit of wrecking organic traffic: duplicate content across two domains, a new site Google barely knows, slow recrawling and launch-day bugs. oDesk’s leadership knew the risk, so they brought in LSG as their SEO consultant and added Joost de Valk and Joe Sinkwitz for second and third opinions. The panel gave the company the confidence to commit to a plan.

What we did

  1. Mapped every old static and dynamic URL to its new-domain equivalent, with 301 redirects ready for launch day.
  2. Kept interface changes to a minimum, and reviewed the few that shipped days before launch for SEO impact.
  3. Hunted down 404 patterns with Search Console, Screaming Frog, Xenu and Majestic, then fixed them: redirects where a good replacement existed, canonicals where a page should live, and broken links removed from the UI.
  4. Sorted every subdomain into “keep” or “kill.” Keepers moved to the new domain; the rest were redirected to the most relevant pages.
  5. Cleaned up the XML sitemaps, remapped them to the new domain and dropped files that didn’t need to be there.
  6. Audited canonical tags across templates and the site taxonomy, consolidating near-duplicate pages to cut duplicate-content and Panda risk.
  7. Warmed up the new domain weeks early by publishing general, non-branded content so Google would crawl and index it before launch.
  8. Worked with the PR team early so the announcement earned a steady stream of links and citations, with help from oDesk’s huge freelancer community.
  9. Audited the development site daily for two weeks before launch, then tracked 2,500 “money” keywords on mobile and desktop in Authority Labs alongside Search Console, with a dashboard updated every morning and a daily 10:30 a.m. triage meeting.

Results

2,500Money keywords tracked daily on mobile & desktop
~30%Of tracked keywords briefly dropped out of the top 10, nine days in
5 daysLater, rankings were back above pre-launch levels

Upwork went live on May 5, 2015, and the team crawled the new site and filed change-of-address requests in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools the same day. Launch-day bugs were fixed fast. Rankings wobbled about nine days in, but old and new URLs kept the traffic flowing, so organic traffic and conversions never visibly dipped, and within five more days rankings had passed where they started. Organic traffic and conversions rose considerably after the rebrand.

Organic traffic: upwork.com vs. odesk.com vs. elance.comEstimated monthly organic traffic from Semrush, January 2014 to December 2016
Semrush organic traffic chart. odesk.com traffic falls to near zero after the switch in May 2015 while upwork.com climbs steadily, passing elance.com in late 2015 and topping 900K by the end of 2016.

Source: Semrush, Organic Traffic report. Semrush figures are modeled estimates.

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