If I change domain, what will happen to my ranks, pr, etc? Let's say I have domain1.com and I want to transfer all the content I have to domain2.com. Both are not on the same servers/host. domain1.com has PR3 rankings, while domain2.com was just registered. What will happen to my ranks, pr, traffic, etc if I do move all my content from domain1.com to domain2.com and just 301 redirect it? Thanks in advance!
Theoretically, a 301 redirect tells google that you are permanently moving all your content to domain2 and there will be a transition point where domain2 will begin to rank the same as domain1 (and domain1 will no longer rank of course). However I personally tried doing a 301 redirect on a page that was ranking well for a competitive term and I ended up being sandboxed for about 3 months. From my experience, it's a risky thing to do and I try to avoid it if possible but maybe other people have had a more positive experience than I have....
How many months till I have to wait for my ranks for domain2.com be as what domain1.com used to have? Thanks btw for your replies!
When you change your domain, all your ranking and pagerank will lost; since it was a NEW DOMAIN. You can still bring it back, but you need to start all over again.
Hope this piece of information will help you. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83105&hl=en
All is not lost if you want to start a new website with the same content from your old website. Use 301 redirects and tell Google you're changing your domain name of your website Via Google Webmaster Tools.
Thank you all. I have another question relating to this. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1905424 Thread: 301 Redirecting Main domain to a parked domain
If i make 301 transfer from the old domain to a new domain by the htaccess file, do i have to keep the old domain alive indefinitely?
Assuming you 301 redirect web pages on your old domain one-by-one to their equivalent new page on the new domain, your rankings and traffic should return after all of your inbound links have been recrawled, the 301 discovered for each inbound link, and credit for those links transfered to the new URLs. This process can take several weeks... sometimes a couple of months... to complete. Once it is complete you should have most of your PR back. There is a slight loss in PR (approximately 10-15%) because of the damping factor that is part of the PR formula.
Yes, I know... sure a risk. . Thanks for your help people. I think I'll just park the domain so the content can be accessible by 2 urls.