Hi folks, I have a domain called www.abc.com that's been up for a few months and has a Google Pagerank of 2 and I want to switch the name to www.xyz.com. What's the best way to do this?? I'm hosted on 1and1.com and I did a Domain "forward" but this has started to decrease the number of daily visitors quite dramatically.. any better suggestions? thanx in advance! Blair
I did something similar. Maybe you can learn from my mistake. I hosted two domains with 1and1. I did a 301 redirect from a PR5 site that was one year old to the new domain, because the new domain had a better URL. However, the site lost about 10% of its traffic and the domain has remained at PR3 ever since. The loss of traffic appears to have been from keywords that were highly competitive---which I was ranking well in before the redirect. It's been nine months and the site still hasn't recovered. However, one unknown factor in this is I have largely ignored the site for six months, so my lack of activity may have been part of the problem. What I learned from all of this is not to mess with moving sites---it appears that moving a site (301 redirect) will have at least some negative affect on traffic and pagerank. That's my story, for what it's worth.
yeah, I read that there is often a little damage caused by 301redirect. However, you should be able to put it back there pretty fast.