Effects of changing domain name

I have a fairly well established site that has been around for years. It performs well in the search engines and has a reasonable number of inbound links. However, it has a domain name that is not at all representative of the content.

I also have another domain name that I would like to change to. I have been considering changing for a while but I can't convince myself that the change will be worth it. Is there a good way to migrate to a new domain name and maintain ranking etc?

I was thinking of putting all new content under the new domain name and then pointing to it from the original domain name. In addition, I could contact all sites linking to the original site and request that they update their links. However, I fear that this would cause my original site to drop significantly in the search engines.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

If anyone is curious, the original site is at http://automailer.com/tws/
The domain I'd like to change to is http://physicaltherapyweb.com
(which currently forwards to the original site).

Thanks in advance for any insight!!

j

 

It takes a while for Google to put you back onto the A list...up to six months.

Heck, I just had a top-scoring site plummet because I removed forums, and Google got upset at seeing all those pages go dark!

 

could you not 301 redirect from your old domain to your new?

 

This is another one of the alternatives I'm considering. However the 'permanent' part scares me a bit. Perhaps I just don't understand the process well enough. I would like the change to be permanent eventually but I'm wondering about potential loss of ranking and traffic for an extended period of time.

With a 301 redirect, will inbound links pointing to the original URL count towards the new URL automatically or will there be a (possibly long) transition period as I try to get sites to update their links? I've tried to research this but found confilicting information.

Does anyone have any full domain changing 301 redirect success stories? ... or nightmares?

 

I would love to know the answer to this too...

 

jedweb,

I would suggest against changing your domain name if you are currently enjoying good rankings.

301 is definitely a good option but even if you 301 your domain to the new one, there would still be some time while google gives you back your rankings.

So unless you are getting only small number of visitors, I would suggest you not to jeopardise your existing rankings

 

anyone with any experience having tried such an experiment with their sites. I would also like to know the answer to the same.