Hello,

My website has many pages indexed in the SERPS and is ranking very well. Unfortunately, though, we need to change both domain name and webservers. There seem to be many ideas on the web about how to do this. I've established my main concerns being:

1. Duplicate content listings in the search engines and lose of pagerank or worse
2. Losing SERP rankings
3. Losing the many inbound links that I have on the internet directed at my old site

What kind of plan do people suggest that I put together to make this work?

Thanks,

I just did this awhile back for a client and it worked out better over all and the rankings improved

1) keep you old domain, but put a 301 redirect to your new domain
make a custom 404 page so that you don't lose your incoming links. keep this up for a least a year. you will suffer no duplicate content penalties. We actually deleted all the content on the old domain and as it redirects to the new domain, dupes are not an issue

2) some
3) yes, you will lose the in bound links and they will need to be changed, but.. the redirect and custom 404 will take care of that. Find your most important linking partners and start having them make the change.

some PR may be transferred to the new site.

you will lose some rankings for about 6 months, some items will actually improve immediately. but you need to give it six months.

it only took a few months for the old domain to fall out of the index.

the good thing is that if you did naything on the old domain that you were getting penalized for (example being link farms, keyword stuffing etc) you will have a fresh start.

short term can be painfull, in the long term things can be greatly improved

keep us posted as to your progress and the results of the changes.

I completely agree with mj1256. We have done the same thing many times over in the past. You get to lose the PR for sometime until you are alloted a fresh PR into your new domain. As mj1256 says so eloquently, short term (results) can be painful.

semmatt, what is your site's home page PR rating?

Many webmasters will claim that PR is not important (which is true in many instances with lower PR sites), but if you have a PR rating of 7 or higher for the home page and a bunch of other pages within the site with PR5's and some PR6's, I'd say no to a domain name change—better off just staying with your existing domain. No, it's not the only factor for SERP ranks, but high PR ratings do carry weight in the ranks.

One thing you can do is to start the new domain and only put up brand new content on it that is not on the old domain. You'll be linking back and forth between the domains for navigation, but that is one way to help the new domain to get established and it gets a PR boost if your existing site has a PR7 or higher. Even PR6 would be worth keeping. PR5 is not that hard to attain but can still take a while to attain with a new domain.

If nearly all of your internal pages have low to zero PR, then moving those pages to your new domain won't have as much impact (after a while passes... ditto what others have said for that circumstance)

It is not good to change domain name. However, if you do, then make sure that you point both names at the one hosting plan, and then set that server so that it issues a 301 redirect if the "wrong" URL is requested.