Will Redirecting an Established domain Lose my Ranking?

[mahogan]

Being very new to SEO my question may seem somewhat uninformed.

I have a web domain that I believe ranks pretty well. I own a local sign company that has started shipping all over the nation. I have a paid ad through Dex Yellow pages and my business gets a lot of inquiries and has been for about 8 years.

I want to turn my company into an online service rather than local, but with a new domain name. I want to redirect my current domain, the one that Dex lists, to the new domain. By doing this will I gain any ranking advantage to my new domain, or will I lose everything from my existing domain? As I see it, anyone looking at the Dex ad will click and be redirected to the new domain. However, I want to be able to maintain my ranking on Google etc.

Hope this makes sense.

[SEO_AM]

You would have to do a 301 permanent redirect. In doing so you may lose up to 20% of the power in your current backlinks. That could affect your current placement in the SERPs.

[Test-ok]

I want to turn my company into an online service rather than local, but with a new domain name

Why do you think you need a new domain to do that?

[imexperttools]

^ Maybe because the old domain names were long or hard to remember, there are a lot of reasons to change the domain names. But it is as said above, it is not recommended to redirect your domain name unless it is absolutely necessary.

[manishchauhan]

Though a permanent redirect would help in this case, but I am still not sure if the domain change would be a nice idea. I would recommend to keep the domain name same (if possible) and change the messaging and marketing activities to give it a look of national website rather than local.

[mahogan]

Thanks everyone for the info. I may just have to start the new site from scratch and try to build its own ranking. Perhaps dedicate a portion of my existing site homepage to direct the user to the new site, local vs national. My whole reason is that I did not want to offer my local base the pricing structure as the national base. There is a lot of hand holding and customer service that is expected locally, whereas on a national level, people just want to buy, check out and get their product, so no hand holding, so the prices can be much cheaper than local. I just have to work through these details. I was hoping to use my existing site with the good national rankings as the online site and change my local site to something else. So I have some thinking to do about this. Thanks again!

[canuckjgc]

A couple of years ago I changed domain names to get a TLD (vs a .ca). It took 12+ months to recover. Re-directing everything perfectly is a tough job, and some blogs etc weren't 301'd right and they happened to have a lot of links to them. Took a very long time for the new site to reflect the PR of the old site as well.