How much of a 'penalty' will I take for changing domain names to a domain with my keywords? My site is in my sig and the name has nothing to do with my niche or keywords. The site is only 2 months old. Should I change my domain name?
I would say you lose all backlink value there for changing the domain name. Since, it is only 2 months old blog there, so you won't see much difference in penalty of rank value.
If you have a 301 Permanent Redirect set on the old domain (pointing to the new one), you likely won't see any penalty. It might take a week or a month or whatever for the search engines to fully propogate the redirect through their algo/system, but the new domain will eventually get the benefit of any links pointing to the old domain. This works well when you are not changing the site in addition to the domain name (ie. you keep the same directory/page structure).