Unhappy with my domain name...

I am pretty unhappy with my domain name but the domain has already a lot authority and pretty awesome backlinks. But I now dislike the domain name. Is there any way that a domain name change would not hurt too much? I am afraid to lose all the backlinks and so.

 

A domain name change will make a massive difference as you'll lose all of your organic backlinks, a few backlinks may be updated and you may well build backlinks quickly again if your site has great content but you're effectively starting over. Though if you really do hate the name, it's better to do it now though than another year down the line

 

Only if I had a penny for each time this happened to me. Like the previous poster said, better change now than later on. Better yet, why don't you just sell it and restart.

 

Or change it and have it redirect of course. That would fix a lot of it.

 

Having it redirect to your new website for at least a year is a must if you are changing your website

 

I wonder redirecting may help the ranking of the new domain name. Probably won't have an instant effect would it?

 

I'm sure it would be fairly fast as all the traffic would just be going to a new domain name. The search engine bots would be doing the same as well. Depending on how fast/often they index the information depends on how it all plays out.

 

We all been there just don't sell it to rapidly, our mind can sometimes play tricks with us.
I'm still regretting a domain sell from the past.

 

It also means the any old links for search will redirect to the new site, not just an error page

 

Change it now, many big websites do this time and time again. Facebook, Ask.com, Perez Hilton, Nbcnews, twitter and even google themselves changed their domain names. Just do it and don't look back.

 

That can be easily fixed if you know what you're doing with the .htaccess file.

 

Thank you all for the encouragement. It´s a hard decision but maybe I really just do it now.

 

having it 301 redirected to new domain won't hurt your current domains performance.

SEOmoz is the recent example, which is now just moz.com

 

Thanks for taking your time to reply. Just as I thought actually. It can go both ways though right? If your traffic somehow drops, wouldn't google see something fishy there?

 

Yeah, but why would your traffic drop? If anyone is attempting to go to either domain, they're going to end up in the same spot. The redirection should prevent any traffic from being lost.