Coller EQT

Name change, domain migration and SEO for private equity secondaries firm, Coller EQT

1200+

URLs redirected one-to-one across three sites

99%

organic traffic recovered within four weeks

Working with SoBold since: 2022

Launch website

Services

Strategic SEO Website Development

Industry Financial Services & Investment

Launch website

Moving the main website and two subdomains onto the new domain on a fixed date

Coller Capital, the private equity secondaries specialist, announced a merger with EQT to become Coller EQT, with the brand transition date occurring on the 1st September 2026. The scope included migrating collercapital.com and its two subdomain sites, Private Wealth Secondaries Solutions and the Secondaries Institute, onto collereqt.com.

The SEO side of the move ran alongside the brand change: baseline, redirect mapping, metadata, Search Console and post-launch indexing checks, with SoBold’s development team handling the server, SSL and the switchover itself.

SoBold has worked with Coller since 2022 across the original site build, with ongoing design and development management and a strategic SEO retainer, so the migration was planned by the team with deep existing knowledge of the sites.

Coller Capital’s combination with EQT was announced in January 2026 and the brand became Coller EQT on 1 September, the day the transaction closed. Collercapital.com had been registered since 1998 and carried the firm’s search presence: around 7,000 organic clicks a month on the main site in August, plus two subdomain sites with rankings and traffic of their own to protect.

With a firm deadline set up the transaction date, logo and copy changes were made on the existing domain on day one and the DNS switch followed as soon as the new domain was ready. DNS itself sat with EQT’s domain team while hosting stayed with SoBold, and a wider visual rebrand, still months away at that point, was kept out of the move deliberately so that the migration changed one thing at a time.

The domain also brought twenty-eight years of URLs with it, from Drupal-era paths, .aspx pages and press-release IDs that had already been redirected once, to PDFs with backlinks and a bare domain forwarded by the registrar over HTTP only. Behind those sat the news archive with decades of transaction history and press releases in which “Coller Capital” was the correct name at the time of writing. All of it needed a decision before the switch, and because the sites are subject to compliance review, metadata could only be written once.

Before anything changed, SoBold captured historical Search Console data for each of the three sites, crawled every site against its XML sitemap, and pulled sixteen months of page-level search data to catch URLs that still earned impressions but no longer appeared in an internal site crawl or the sitemap. That inventory became the redirect map, one row per URL, with every path on the old domain mapped to its equivalent on the new one.

A host-level rule on each old hostname sends every request to the same path on the new host in one hop, covering pages, uploads, feeds and anything never listed. Beneath it, ninety-three legacy URLs whose paths could not be preserved got explicit rules of their own. Metadata was rewritten once under a naming rule agreed with the client.

Organization schema was updated with Coller Capital retained as the alternate name and new Search Console properties were created ahead of the switch so change of address could be submitted as soon as the redirects were live.

The three sites moved on 1 September 2026. In the weeks after, SoBold checked every page on the new domain, fixed what surfaced, and tracked old and new domains side by side against the August baseline.

Inside the migration

The four pieces of work that carried 28 years of search equity across the domain change.

Every URL from the crawl, the sitemaps, sixteen months of Search Console page data and the backlink profile went into one redirect map, typed as live, legacy redirect or already broken, and given a one-to-one target. Three previously broken URLs that still carried backlinks were mapped to the right target page for relevancy instead of to the homepage.

Path-preserving URLs, which was almost all of them, are handled by the host-level rule, so the files handed to the development team served as verification lists. The 93 legacy paths were checked individually against the new site before launch and sorted into leave, edit, fix or add, with the largest group being rules that had lived in server config and so never came across with the WordPress copy. Media kept its redirects too, as the PDFs had backlinks with equity we wanted to preserve.

More than 700 indexable pages across the three sites needed a decision on their titles and descriptions, and the brand name could not simply be swapped everywhere. Press releases, deal announcements and awards from before 1 September keep “Coller Capital”, because that was the firm’s name when the news happened. Evergreen pages and people profiles carry “Coller EQT”. Fund names, sub-brands and the founder’s name were protected from the swap entirely.

Because every change goes through compliance review, the metadata was written once, in a workbook where the brand name and new hostname were single inputs and every title, description and redirect target recalculated from them.

Each of the three sites kept its own Search Console property, with three new properties created ahead of launch. Change of address was submitted from each old property once the homepage and a sample of URLs were confirmed to redirect, and the new sitemaps were submitted straight after. Organization schema was updated with the new name and URL, with Coller Capital kept as the alternate name so search engines connect the two identities.

The old properties stay open as the monitoring window for anything still resolving to old URLs, and the redirects stay in place for as long as the old domain is owned.

In the weeks after the switch, SoBold fetched all 648 URLs in the three sitemaps and read the title, description, social tags and canonical on each, checking every live page against the naming rule and the redirect map. Anything that had not come across as planned was corrected on the live sites and re-checked the same day.

A further sweep put 667 URLs through the URL Inspection API to rebuild the indexing picture page by page, since Search Console’s indexing report cannot be exported. It showed Google had already processed the move for the pages that mattered and was working through the archive on its normal crawl cycle, which set the priorities for re-indexing requests and the fortnightly client updates. Re-run two weeks later, the same sweep showed 90% of the main site’s pages indexed on the new domain, up from 70%.

Beyond the launch

By the fourth week, 99% of organic clicks to the main site were landing on collereqt.com and branded search traffic was level with August; by the sixth, 90% of the main site’s pages were indexed at the new address.

SoBold is tracking old and new domains side by side each week, requesting indexing on the pages that still draw search traffic at the old address, and will report recovery against the August baseline once positions settle.

The monthly AI visibility run that SoBold already carries out for Coller now doubles as a rebrand tracker, measuring when ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude start answering questions about the firm with its new name.

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