Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Our company has reached a critical point where we are seriously considering changing domain names. We've been in biz for 1 year, and finally got our pages in the top 5 of the Google SERPS. We're growing fast. Our pages have PR's of at most 2, and yet we rank above sites with PR's of 5 who have been around for years! As far as I know we only have a few backlinks. We're getting good traffic, enough to where we can barely keep up with orders.
However, the problem is that one of our main competitors has been in biz longer and has a domain name so similar to ours that our customers are getting mixed up. We have different company names on our respective sites, but our domain names look like widget.com and widdget.com. It was our mistake! Now I'm afraid that people are seeing our competitor ranked #1 in SERPS, and they skip us (ranked #2) because they think we're the same site. We want to have a more unique domain name to set ourselves apart from everyone else, especially our main competitor.
How can I make a clean change and keep our rankings? I've read all the posts, and it looks like I can build a new site on a new server with the new domain name, try and get it ranking in the SERPS, and then do a 301 from the old site to the new, or links on all pages on the old site going to the new. Some have even suggested taking all the old content minus the navigation from the old site and putting it on the new, and then have the old site's navigation point to the new site (to help the bots).
What's the best way? Any success stories?
