I've been running my largest websites for over 5 years now, and it now has a lot of backlinks and ranks #1 on google for many terms. When I first bought the domain I knew nothing about SEO and unfortunately there are no keywords in this domain that are related to my website. If I was to use a better domain name seo-wise (this new domain has also been registered for 1 year), and 301 redirect every page to the exact same page on the new domain, would I lose any google rankings I'm getting right now or should the new site start ranking exactly the same (well, or better hopefully) as the old one ? This site delivers about 60% of my income, so I can't really afford to run into any issues. Is it worth a try or should I just leave my site as-is?
Well if its ranking for a number of terms i'd say leave it...although im not too sure i do think google bots can follow re-directs from certain aspects of a page. Let me verify that and when i do ill post here.