Moving popular subdirectory in a subdomain to a new domain

[acac]

One of our blog which is hosted on a sub-directory of a sub-domain ( blog.example.com ) has become very popular. The sub-domain is pretty old ( over 5 years ) and enjoys great Google love in search ranking & results. However the sub-domain itself is focused on a topic entirely different from the sub-directory in question.

We have plans to re-design the site ( currently a sub-directory of a sub-domain ) and as part of the effort I am thinking of moving it to a entirely new site, a newly purchased domain.

I plan to 301 re-direct all existing pages (over 20, 000) to a new site and create unique branding. Currently the home page of this site has PR 4 and has high SERPS for competitive terms. It has over 10k page impressions daily and increasing.

Is it a good idea? What are the chances of being adversely affected in Google search results? What kind of Google penalties it can incur.

Overall would you recommend it as a good long-term strategy or should we continue as it is till it becomes even more popular.

[tedster]

Moving to a completely new domain? Here's the potential downside - possibly a year or more to regain existing search traffic levels.

If the re-branding is essential, then plan to devote a lot of promotional/marketing time after the move. If you do that, you might cut the pain period down to several months. In short, it's a tough move, and not to be undertaken lightly, IMO.

As I see it, this has been a major flaw in the Google ranking algo for years. There's no good way to painlessly move a legitimate business to a new domain name, even when there are other solid business reasons for the move. Things are better than they were a few years ago, but they're still not very good.

I have a client who is planning something like this right now. The sub-site is currently part of a major website: PR8 home page, and the section of the site being split off has PR7 "home" page.

The move still gives me the heebie-jeebies, but the re-branding is key for them. And they are not currently doing very well in search traffic anyway, except for branded search terms. If they do well, I'll certainly post about it.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

IF you really are looking to shift to new domain with a new structure, I would recommend that do it in phases and not all at one go. For one of my client sites (with over 15K pages) we first moved to the new domain setup the re-directs and after about 3 months (when PR's were transfered) started to redesign. In redesign also we are moving section by section.

[acac]

Thanks to both of you and Tedster in particular. Your words made me rethink the decision.

It would have been great if Google provided a way to let them know about such a move using WMT. Hope ASA is listening.