Hi to Digital Point users, My name Ashok Kumar and a web expert and professional blogger. I plan to move my popular site to new domain name by using 301 permanent URL redirect. My old site got Page Rank 2 and very popular and mostly appears along with Wikipedia pages for some popular keywords. In peak times (monthly one or two days guarantee) it receives 20,000 to 100,000 page views per day and in normal days 1000 visitors per day. My problem is about website traffic reduction. Any website owner who already redirected old domain name to new domain name can answer to my question that did you lose website traffic or you get same traffic from Google? Based on your experience, i would like to take decision. Pls, Experts & Experienced site owners answer to my question.
No, It should not affect performance. check the article from the Official Webmaster blog with best practices to move to a new domain: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html
I've moved a site from one URL structure to another (didn't change the domain). I did a 301 redirect from the old pages to the new ones without any problems. One thing you should do is keep the old site up until it stops getting search engine hits since it takes a little time for the search engines to move your old pages out of the index and put the new pages in.
There will be drop in SERP's and surely this will effect your traffic.. As the old domain and its inner pages will get down and won't have any contents, thus Google won't consider them ranking and this ultimately will make you loose your ranking