used .com for years. Want to use .edu

[cmendla]

I have a situation where a tech/trade school has used a .com domain for years. They have always been eligible for an .edu and have had an .edu. Incoming requests to the .edu were redirected to the .com site.

We recently moved to office 365 for email. For a number of reasons, we used the .edu for the office 365 email. They still have their .com email addresses.

Also, the hosting for the .com is on an old hosting plan and needs to be moved to a plan with newer hosting.

I'm thinking that I can perhaps move the site to the .EDU domain on the new hosting and set up a 301 redirect on the old site via .htaccess.

I'm just wondering if I'm falling into any kind of traps here.

I"m also wondering how much of a drop in traffic I could expect to see assuming I implement the move and redirection properly?

thanks

chris

[not2easy]

In June an article published here tells about new guidelines and recommendations that Google issued for moving sites where the domain name is or is not the same, the article is here: [webmasterworld.com...] or you can read it from Google: [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

It may give you the information you want before getting started.

[lucy24]

Conversely: Does .edu still carry more authority than plain .com? I know the rules for .edu eligibility were relaxed a few years ago, but there are still rules.

[cmendla]

@not2easy - thanks for the link. I read through it and will make sure I go step by step. I wouldn't have thought of sitemapping both the old and new sites.

@lucy24 - We're killing a couple of birds with one stone with the move:

1. the old hosting for the .com is not up to par. Ie we can't migrate to Joomla 3.x.
2. The spamassassin on the old hosting is not the latest version.
3. The .edu should provide a little more 'prestige' in a highly competitive industry.
4. The site ranks well organically. I'm not sure about the impact of edu vs com but my best guess is that it should provide some additional margin.
5. The website will be in line with the new .edu email addresses.
6. The new hosting should be faster than the old hosting so we should see an improvement in visitor retention.

I'm going to start planning the move and will document