How to change a domain without changing your rank

[Ride45]

We have a top ranked domain for big money terms. Our company may be acquired shortly, and there is already talk about changing the domain to reflect a new company name. What is the best way to do this without impacting our ranking. Permanent Redirects? Getting all our backlinks Changed? Any other suggestions?

THanks

[tedster]

This topic comes up a lot - you can do search on Google with site:webmasterworld.com in terms to turn up older conversations.

The summary is that you can use a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new to maintain traffic, but most of the time a new domain on Google runs into the "sandbox effect" and does not rank for some period of time -- which can be many months.

I know of one business that migrated to the .com version of their name when it became available nine months ago. The previous .org version was ranking at that time, but the new .com domain is still not showing despite a lot of new top-quality inbound links, and many new pages developed. Lots of traffic and sales continues to come from Yahoo, who barely showdd a hiccup, but Google is another story.

At the same time another business in a slightly less competitive area spent only 4 weeks before showing up in the search results. So sometimes you get off easy. However, I think a more extended exile seems more common right now.

In short, if you change domain names, you should PLAN for a bump in the road -- and possibly a big one.

[Ride45]

I guess the "sandbox" would apply. I was hoping there was some way around this using a 301 redirect.

Thanks for the quick and good response.