Should I move to a new domain (with 301 redirect) or not ?

[AlexDumitru]

I have been thinking for a few months to move my website to a new domain name, but I am afraid of the implications.

My website is 2.5 years old, has a lot of very high quality links, all natural and from high autority websites ( nytimes, wsj, and so on ).

The reasons I am thinking about moving it to a new domain and changing it's name is because I chose a really bad name for it, which can be misunderstood. Also since Google's Panda my US traffic went down a lot and I believe moving it to a new domain and changing the SEO strategy for a bit might help.

Now here's what I'm not sure about:
Will I lose any ranks, link juice and authority, especially that I want to move it to a very new domain name ?

Is there any problem if I'm going to change the URLs ? e.g. moving from old.com/news/2332-news-title.html to new.com/news-title/

Is it possible to get rid of a penalty or have higher chances of recovering from Panda by moving it ?

Will new pages rank lower because they won't have any juice coming from the old website ?

Let's talk a bit about this, please.

Thanks !

[tedster]

There can be a short-term dip in traffic. It gets worse if there is any technology mis-step along the way. However, if your current domain name is an unfortunate choice and rebranding is the ideal for long-term goals, then yes, go through with it.

It's not nearly as daunting as it was a few years back, although you may lose a little klout from backlinks. Unless you are protecting your ranking positions for some very competitive search terms, you may not notice the bump very much.