Experiences with changing domains

[danbot]

I understand that there are alot of other postings for this.
But I'm after people who have had actual experiences.

I have a domain name that i have had registered for a bit over a year and has already started getting ranked well for my desired search terms.

However, i am concerned about possible trademark infringements of my domain and also its marketability.

I'm wanting to hear from people who have done this, their strategies, whether or not they succeeded, and possibly the reasons why they may not have.

[tedster]

We have a client who changed domains in 2005. This was their first site for a 40 year old B&M busienss, and it was beginning to get Google traffic. But a more appropriate domain name became available and for the long term, they felt they needed to make the shift.

They did a domain level 301 redirect, and shortly after that their Google traffic dried up to a mere trickle, as we warned them it might. They made no content changes at this time, just the domain name change with all internal urls remaining the same.

The new domain spent a little over 8 months suffering from the classic "sandbox effect" and then they rapidly began to get a substantial amount of search traffic -- and search traffic remains healthy (and is growing) to this moment. During their "sandbox effect" time, to build sales the client did a lot of offline marketing, plus online PR efforts and a PPC campaign.

They never opted for an intentional link building campaign. They did however get a few spontaneous links from some very prominent sites. We were hopeful that those links would establish enough trust to return their Google rankings, but it was not immediately the case.

[dancy]

Hi!
Our company is intending to change the domain name as well as the Main product name and there will be a lot of new content on the new site, we are forced to change it because it's similar to other registered trademark.
The domain name is 1 year old.

Now we have very good positions in Google,Msn and Yahoo Serps for the main key phrase, also we are included in Dmoz listing.

I even cann't imagine what should we expect from these changes, even using the 301 redirect.

Also I wonder, do the changes of content and names dramatically affect the new domain name positions in Serps?
Any opinions?

[plasma]

I never had a problem with 301 redirects.

[JoaoJose]

Hi. I changed most of my .com domain to a .country domain and had no problems. I say most because some pages of my affiliate program were kept on the .com domain. I redirected all pages but those.

I kept a log that I was thinking of posting so here we go:

21/07/2006 - 301 redirect .com to .country
22/07/2006 - 5 pages listed by Google
23/07/2006 - 83 pages by Google, 5 pages by Yahoo
24/07/2006 - 29 pages and 20 backlinks by Yahoo, first Google referrals for both homepage and internal pages, Google lists new domain with Dmoz description although Dmoz still lists .com domain
25/07/2006 - 2 pages by MSN, 116 pages by Google, 121 pages and 30 backlinks by Yahoo
26/07/2006 - 193 pages by Google, 16 pages by MSN, 162 pages and 51 backlinks by Yahoo. At this point any of the big 3 returns the new domain for a site's name search.
27/07/2006 - 249 pages by Google, 234 pages by Yahoo
28/07/2006 - 278 pages by Yahoo
30/07/2006 - 367 pages by Yahoo, 554 pages by Google
...

And stopped looking. Since the last backlink update [webmasterworld.com...] that Google points all links to the new domain. But it still lists a lot of urls for the old domain as supplemental.

Hope it helps.

[dancy]

JoaoJose , thanks.
I hope we'll have the same...

[danbot]

In the case that a 301 redirect puts you back to having no site ranking, do you think it is a viable option to test this out for a week, and if things turn bad, switch back to the old domain?

I am wondering if the amount of time you have registered the new domain for before doing the switch has any effect on success.

I have had my own personal experience doing a domain switch for a company i worked for. However the domain we switched to was already in use and pointing to the domain we were switching from. So effectively we reversed the 301 redirect around. Prior to this we had spent a number of years sending all online marketting urls to the domain we were switching to.

This may be an option for some businesses. If you can wait it out, then maybe it is worth setting up your new domain to point to the one you want to replace. Build up some links to the new one over the course of a year and then do the switch.