Changing Domain

Hi All

I have been lurking around the forum for about 6 months now soaking up the wealth of knowledge.

I have come across a minor issue.

we currently use our company name as the domain www.ourlongcompanyname.co.uk however the management wish to change the domain to another that we own www.ourkeywords.com

Both domains seem to have PR6 and 90% of our traffic comes from PPC campaigns. Our organic search results are extremely poor and we are starting to work on this now.

What would be the best way to migrate to the new domain?

Will we get penalised for using both domains during the transition period and for keeping both running after?


Cheers

Stuart

As I understand things you may get penalised if you have duplicate content i.e. are both sites exactly the same? Maybe someone else can confirm or correct that.

Our domain used to be .net since the .com wasn't avaliable.

After two years the .com was avaliable so we reserved.

We had awesome rankings for the .net.

When switching domain names most say that you should you a 301 permanent redirect to avoid any issues.

I was willing to take the chance, we went ahead and put the site up under the .com and used paid inclusion to get the .com into the engines.

Then I changed all of the back links to our site on our clients sites to the .com.

It worked awesome, both sites had a page rank of 6. Most of the keywords we targeted had both the .net and .com showing in the SERPs.

Traffic went up by over 30% and our monthly leads amost doubled.

The bad news is that I hired a new network adminstrator who made a bunch of changes, necessary changes, but when he set it back up he just used the .com. Since .net produced most of the traffic and had more back links to, when he dropped the .net it hurt really bad.

He also forgot to attach the 404 page.

So on the last Google update the .net wasn't available, as well as the 404 page was missing. The 404 is very important for us since we also switched from as ASP site to a Cold Fusion site, all of the page names changed, instead of having a dead link the 404 page maintained our rankings.

But on the last update with both issues or page rank dropped to a 4, however our rankings are still the same.

Now the .net is back up as well as the 404 page. Now we just have to wait on Google.

Using both worked out really well for us, however realize there is some risk involved. At the time I decieded to do it, we had more work than we could handle. Over the past few months we have turned away work because we are to busy.

Considering we are so busy the rankings aren't as important as they were for us say a year ago. However being an SEO and marketing consulant we still have to have very good rankings.

Now instead of targeting 1000 keywords we are only targeting about 20 keywords.

The point is, can you afford the risk, if so go for it.

Ray Gonzalez