Now here's the good news: bluewidgetSHOP.com, redwidgetSHOP.com and greenwidgetSHOP.com are still free to register! Obviously it would be sweet for branding to have all the site names ending in *shop.com (since it's not possible to do it with *store.com), but how do I go about this?
I've read all kinds of stuff about 301 redirects (both on this site and elsewhere), but very often the webmasters reported back that it didn't bring them any luck (loss of business, site fell off Google, etc.). So I'm not quite sure what to do.
Bluewdigetstore.com ranks very well in Google, and I'm afraid to lose that position no matter what I do (unless I do nothing). I could just point bluewidgetshop.com at bluewidgetstore.com (via server redirect) and leave it there, but the way I see it, whenever someone links to bluewidgetstore.com, it will not count towards the Pagerank of bluewidgetshop.com (and vice versa), so when all is said and done, my page won't rank as good as it could/should.
In a dream world, I would permanently redirect (301) all pages on the old bluewidgetstore.com to the corresponding pages on the new bluewidgetshop.com, and as long as the redirects are in place, the new site would inherit all the old pagerank and add to it the authority it gets from new links that are directly pointed to the pages in the new location. I have read a couple of posts that indicate that this is indeed what happens, but like I said, I also heard about frustrated webmasters who insist that this is not at all the case.
Some more input would be greatly appreciated!
