I've got a big issue about my client domain and would like some advice.
We've purchased few domains, but we've been using only one and if the other domains are entered in the browser they will be redirected to the domain we use. We have a good PR, good rank position for dozens keywords and good traffic and we've reached to the point where we'll need to change the domain used now to one of the others. How would that affect our PR, ranking position and traffic?
Any advice would be very appreciated thanks
:)
How would that affect our PR, ranking position and traffic?
You'll be starting out fresh and you will lose almost everything that you now have.
How would that affect our PR, ranking position and traffic?
This is a search question not a domain question.
[webmasterworld.com...]
Theoretically IF you do everything correctly you should be able to pass along all your current rankings etc.
I have a friend who did this recently with a .com and a brand new .co.uk domain name, within days all benefits were transferred to the .co.uk site and still ranking.
PageoneResults, that is what I thought and heard about changing Domains, but now Husky Pup just proved the opposite.
Where's the proof? What if I said I had proof of the opposite? ;)
Your results will vary. I can tell you from past experiences with "domain name" changes that the resulting effect was painful to say the least. It took a solid year to recover from the name change and even then, it was not a full recovery. You don't take thousands of pages that have been indexed under one domain for 5 years and then move them to a new domain and expect them to seamlessly perform as they did previously. No, I didn't see that happen. What I saw was a slow painful recalculation of the new domain and it went through a similar process as if it were "brand spankin' new", you know, that Sandbox stuff everyone discusses around here.
If you've "got" to make the change, there are some things you'll want to consider before hand. The most important being your inbound links. I can tell you that it is going to be a bear getting all of your inbounds updated. I believe the 301 layer trims a little juice in the process. Not a whole lot, but enough to notice. Go to the sources and update the IBLs so that layer is not there. A move like this takes careful planning. Each and every old page needs to be 301'd to its respective new page. You'll need to "triple check" your 301s, 404s, etc. One mishap in the rewrite configuration and you're toast.
If you use the Apache web server, you place a line like the following either in your httpd.conf or a .htaccess file:
Redirect permanent / http://www.example.com/
To redirect just one file:
Redirect permanent /foo.html http://www.example.com/bar.html
