I work for a company that has a website url that I consider too hard to pass along to the casual computer user verbally, which I think is not a good thing. So, I want my company to buy another url and have it point to the same website (for people friendliness). Ex: www.some_company-name-co.com (original) www.socomnc.com (suggested new - much easier to remember) Would we be penalized by google?
I don't see any penalty from Google coming your way, but there is an "opportunity cost." If you quit publicizing the longer name, then you won't get any new incoming links from it.
we had the same problem, and so what we did was 301 redirect from the older harder to remember name to the newer one. We were not penalised (for more than 2 weeks) and all went well. when looking at the site, it looked as though we bought it some months ahead, got it indexed and then did the 301 redirect to it after about 4 months (after it came out of the samdbox.) don't know if that was necessary or not. What you MUST do is replicate your old site so that each page is 301ed with exactly the same name and content as the new one.
We did (on advice) and it seemed to work at the time. We re-wrote the .htaccess file on the old site to read: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yournewsite.com/$1 [R=301,L] You may need to get more advice on this as well, as I do not know what G are doing at the moment in regards to this. We have also done the same to another site in the last few days. I will tell you how it goes if you like. At the moment, serps have dropped dramatically. I hope it is only a small glitch. If you change the content or urls, I think G would see it as a new site trying to gain PR from an old one, and ignore it.
If you don't have a 301 your site can look mirrored to search engines. There should only be one URL to get to any page.