Planning to change the Domain Name. will it help my site?

Hi
I have a popular website on how to make money online. There are some problems with it. It is .in website. It does not help me gain international rankings. I am looking forward and develop it as a site that caters to International audience. The solution I am thinking is

1. Changing the Domain name to .com
2. Redirecting the traffic from the existing traffic to the new site via 301redirect.

But I have some nagging questions though

1. I have at present a PR3 rank.
2. I have a healthy traffic that is between 600 uniques to 1400 a day.
3. If I change my domain name will my PR rank go with it. Will it get transferred to the new domain on next update?

I need some help from you guys. I am looking for someone to help me personally.

 

Changing the domain name to .com is a good idea as it gives a global exposure to your site than .in domain. Your new .com domain will get traffic and pr but it will take sometime; definitely you will reach pr3 in less time if you are maintaining the quality in your site

 

Thanks for the TIP. The question I asked was whether I would get the PR transferred to me in the next update. Because I am planning to move all my site and it is considered good by Google and Yahoo. What I am looking forward is whether the PR get transfered immediately( following update). I would like to know the negatives of changing domain

 

It takes time for the PR to transfer from the redirected domain to the new one. You have to wait on the search engine to recrawl EVERY inbound link, discover the redirect and transfer credit for that one link to the new domain on a link-by-link basis. So how long it takes will depend on how often the URLs on other sites that link to you get crawled.

Your new domain's PR will get updated each time Google discovers an old URL's 301 and transfers credit for that particular link... the "actual" PR anyway. Your actual PR (the one used in their ranking algorithm) is updated constantly. Who gives a crap whether your Toolbar PR is updated with the next update. The Toolbar PR is meaningless. It's not used at all in ranking your URL and it's ALWAYS out of date.

Expect to loose rankings and traffic until the whole process is complete. If a page on your .co.in has 100 inbound links, as soon as Google discovers the 1st 301 redirect when crawling an inbound link (regardless of whether its an inbound from your site or an external site), your old URL with 100 links will be removed from their indexed and replaced with your new URL. Only at that point the new URL only has 1 known inbound link. As Google recrawls more and more of the links to your old URL and repeatedly finds the 301 redirect, one-by-one credit for those inbound links will be transfered over to the new target URL.

Your rankings and traffic, however, may never return without additional work. My guess is that your site's URLs are bringing organic traffic primarily from Google.co.in since country coded top level domains (ccTLDs) imply to Google that you want to ranking THAT country's view of Google. Ranking in Google.co.in is likely MUCH easier than ranking in Google.com. Also, I'm guessing many of your back links are from other .co.in domains... which again, primarily help your rank in Google.co.in.

Once you have the new domain up and the redirects in place, you'll want to start building links from other sites that are targeting Google.com (not Google.co.in).

 

From some studies I have made about localization I do not think that having .co.in domain is necessarily going to hurt you. One of the first posts I wrote on this subject (why #1 in Google is worthless in the rest of the world) actually showed that the #5 in Google.com for the keyword "cars" was actually an Australian company (with the .au ccTLD). Check out also the other post (How to rank locally) so as to see what things might actually cause you NOT to rank globally. I have not written yet a post about how to expand from local to global, but your problem might actually push me to write it...

Regarding the other aspects:

One problem with the 301 redirect is that though it does eventually transfer the PR of the old site, it does not change the original links, which point to the old site. If at a certain moment you drop the old domain, you will lose all those links (and visitors clicking on them - not all traffic comes from the search engines).

My experience is also that it's usually a bad idea to change the domain extension. However, as an alternative, you may want to park the .com extension on top of the .co.in one... It will not give you additional PR, but you'll get some visitors, which will type .com by default (happens all the time), and prevent somebody from picking up that name & get that little additional traffic.

 

No You can not get Same PR with that redirect. It will take some time may be 6+ months atleast. Once you will start getting traffic organically then you can get PR nearby..

Negative is your traffic may get reduced from 2-3 months until google will not indexed your new domain and its content and removes old content

 

Because of 301 redirection you got little-bit benefit but your PR will not automatically transfer you must have to do an additional work for it.
i think if you may stick with the old domain name is more beneficial because age of the domain is also an important factor and you have done lot of link building for old one.

 

From the posts above, I think it is safe to keep my existing domain and continue with it. Taking risk with a site that is returning nearly 1000 uniques a day is a big risk. I would like more ideas before I decide though

 

I would go for the 301 redirect to the .com site.
Thousands of websites change domains everyday and this is so common. The pAge rank will be passed.

 

As stated in my previous post, I'd just do the opposite: Buy the .com domain and redirect it with a 301 to the .co.in domain, to get the traffic of people who mistakenly type in .com instead of .co.in. But the other way round? Not me!

 

Yes, you may full well lose your PR rank during the change and this may take a while to appear on your new domain. But, Google claimed long ago that PR is no longer used to rank sites on search engines so this is nothing to worry about.

Using a 301 redirct will send the traffic to the correct domain is required.

 

You will certainly lose your pr but as mentioned above Google do not rank site based on pr, there are a number of factor they also consider.

I wouldn't advise you throw away your old url like that, you can actually use it for back links. Talk to SEO experts on this and you will be amazed about that.