changing company URL (after 8 years)

I started a new job and the company has completely ignored SEO for the past 7-8 years. The site doesn't appear whatsoever for the company's top 20 most desired keywords. According to Webtrends, around 60% of the visits are direct visits, the rest are from AdWords. That's the situation.

The site is a PR5 and has only 3 backlinks, the only notable one is business.com.

This company commissioned a web design service to redo the site from scratch, and it will be done in September. Now, one of my major decisions is to buy and use a new URL (instead of having CompanyName.com, this company was using an illogical URL for the past 8 years, and I think it is detrimental to the business). So, I'm going for the companyname.com style URL.

My question is how badly it will affect things in this case? The company is basically non-existent on Google and all of the other search engines, yet it has a decent PR5 that is probably due to the fact that the URL has been around since 1999...what would you suggest?

Thanks

 

I think any bad effects will be out weighed by the good.
As long as the old domian points to the new website, for those that have it bookmarked, then I dont see any problems.
You can get the PR and serps to a higher level than the old site in a fairly short amount of time.

 

This is a crazy situation. In today's day and age it is amazing that companies ignore their website...

 

I think judging from your info that it would be benificial to start from scratch with a new site, new domain, etc and then place a small site on the old domain that only links out to the new site and that PR will help the new site quickly get PR. Once the PR on the new site is bosted, then get rid of the original.

so in otherwards start a new one, but dont abandan the original right away, slowly phase it out taking advantage of it at the same time.

 

Thanks for your feedback. I agree with everything said here, I was kind of hoping this would be the response!

 

I would go with the new setup and 301 redirect the old site to the new so you will get your PR transferred and also keep your serps like they should be and then start doing some quality seo on the new one. I did this with a website already and within 2 months the traffic started to roll in.

 

if you are going to change your main site url, i suggest you to use 301 redirect from old one the new one.

if you do this , you will loose nothink from your web site

 

Yeah. Just do a 301 redirect. The 3 links will be "forwarded" to the new site.

You can use mod_rewrite if it's installed or just use the 301 Redirect command in .htaccess if not.