Hi, I have a website which I created nearly 5 years ago. It has around 10,000 Unique visitors, (Google Analytics). I have around 600 backlinks to my Website. Its a Google PR 5 site. The website is a Forum right now, it has nearly 80,000 registered members. I wish to update it and make it into a Social Network which fits what I do. I am looking to converting the whole site using the Drupal platform. I have another domain name which a lot of people say is better than the one I am currently using. That domain name is not being used at the moment. Its a lot more catchy and feels more Social networky.... From a purely Marketing perspective, the new domain name is better. I want to move my website, with all its content to the other domain name. What would you advise? Should I stick to the old domain name (which is not so good and also has some misconceptions) or take the new one. What would happen if i moved to the new site, and simply had people redirected to it? Is there a way for the Search Engines to be told that this is now the new home of the old site? Keep in mind that I am going to change the site structure anyway, because I am going to be converting the whole Vbulletin forum to Drupal Forum. Its just that I am also thinking of changing the Domain Name as well.. So instead of mywebsite.com/forum --- it will be > coolsite.com/forum Thank You!
Please, Im already getting a bad impression about this site. There are so many spammy replies and threads here!!
is it pretty common to find the need of changing the domain name of a successful business or site. also it is common to change the file extensions, for example form html to PHP or ASP etc. if you must do the change and truly believe that it will be beneficial to you in the long run, then by all means go ahead and make the change. you can move all the content over to the new site and do a 301 redirect from your old domain to the new one. this way you will not get any ranking loss. regarding the backlinks, try to move as much as you can to the new domain. once the new site is up and running, start doing some seo for the new site as well and just go from there
Obviously you know how to build a site, and get traffic. Why ruin that? Build your other site with your new name and build traffic separately. Eventually you will have 2 sites with traffic. If your social network idea doesn't fly the way you are proposing it will, then you lose all the traffic from your current site if you do it your way. Just a thought.
That's a really stupid answer to that question. lol. Go make another site? lol To the topic creator: I wouldn't do that myself. When you transfer to to new domain you will toast a domain that has 5yrs of backlinks and what not. The older the domain is the more respect it gets for google serps. It does not help that you are not mentioning what the two domains are though because its hard to determine how false the current domain is. What I would do is Redirect the better domainname to hit to the old one then where ever its mentioned try to turn over the members to realize that this new domain does exist. When doing SEO and getting backlink try to use the newer domain. The domain needs to get more backlinks before you can change it. Once that new domain has starts to get some backlinks then> BAM!!! make the change. Do it overnight, as fast as possible. Release mass E-mail(PM) to your members that the domain has been changed to "the new one", then make a press release and release it to as many release sites. You should be good to go after that. Congrats on the 80,000 member old site though.
Hello- IMHO, you shouldn't opt for new domain as the domain itself carry lots of value. If you have a strength of more than 80000 members, then many visitors remember the site by name. Here you can lost those members. Still, if you can't keep going with the old domain, you must follow below things: 1) The New domain design should mention that earlier it was known as ''''xxxx'''' 2) You should put 301 redirection on each page to their respective page 3) 301 redirection itself will transfer all the search engine value to your new domain 4) In the meantime, you can start building links for the new domain However, you will still get your 80-90% of original traffic! So, if you can afford losing that traffic level, this is ok to change the domain...!
I also would not do that. I had an experience even "only" changing permalinks, my traffics dropped extremely a lot, because the backlinks i have built were all gone. Changing a name would be worse than changing permalinks, in my opinion.