Old domain - new look OR new domain

I am managing a website for a long time which as Google PR4 and has page 2 positions for very difficult keywords. Total pages in Google index are 850. The domain name is not easy to remember as has initials of company name followed by hyphen, so difficult to speak.

A new recruit in the company wants to use a domain which is company name. The site has only 50 pages, and no Google PR, because there are no efforts done for SEO of this site.

I am reluctant to let go hard work which has given reasonable business to the company so far. It will take lot of time to get good positions for the new domain for same keywords.

Please advise how to tackle about this issue.

If your original site has good rankings and can be found by your target market, I wouldn't change it. Being able to say a site's address doesn't help if no one can find it when they search the products/services/info you're offering. You could use setup a 301 Redirect from the old site to the new site, but you will see a downtime before you regain your position in the SERPs.

I'd say it really depends on how you're marketing your site. If you're using written ads and online links, then no one's going to be saying the name anyway.

Thanks Roa. Should I be doing 301 redirect from www.abc.com to www.xyz.com? I mean, as number of pages on abc.com are much large in numbers than www.xyz.com, I can not redirect individual pages.

If I then want to add content from old site to new site, will it be a duplicate content issue? I do not want to waste earlier time spent on old site content creation.

Think twice about doing 301 redirects there are risk and rewards associated with this like>\

Risk:
a. It will affect your current rankings.
b. You will momentarily lose traffic.
c. The domain that is the target of the redirect may not be the one you own. Make sure you are the legal owner of it too.

Rewards:
a. You get a good brand name by your decision.


More risk I could think of, so maybe i suggest not to go ahead with this plan.