Of all the reasons I can think of for dumping your holdings, that's probably one of the more ludicrous. He would have been a "disaster in marketing" if he'd stayed with a name that's synonymous with being stuck in a dark corner.

I've spent the last 10 years writing eCommerce systems for highly competitive businesses where they are precious as hell about their SEO. Google has changed its trawling algos beyond recognition in the last few years. Just because you've got a year's worth of 'clicks' to your credit doesn't mean you can't be dropped in an instant or - conversely - that you can't capitalise on rankings that you've earned to date.

What the marketing team need to do is carefully use 301's to redirect the crawlers to the new domains. That will let the new domains capitalise on the ranking that the current sites have.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en

At any rate, search engine rankings are only 1 aspect of a very big proposition - if anything it's why the name change needs to be done now and not when the project's been driven so far up the "dark" cul-de-sac that it doesn't have an option anymore.

Also, see this.....https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg10740995#msg10740995