I could really use some advice about whether changing a domain name for an established website is harmful to my SERPs. I am a web developer and my client has a commercial website which has attracted a few thousand backlinks over the years. But I'm building them a brand new website at the moment with a completely different structure and a lot of different content (although still within the same industry sector) and they are thinking about using a new domain name for this website. I have warned them that I think they might lose a lot of ground in the search engines initially but I can't be sure and don't really know how best to mitigate this. I'm guessing I should redirect the old domain to the new site as well as using a new domain but I'd really like to get some input from some experts. So what do you think?
As far as SERP results go it would be like starting a new website from scratch so your search results will suffer... If you keep the old domain and redirect it to the new domain you will still keep the current traffic... But Google will soon drop the old domains SERPs rankings and eventually de-index the pages... Cheers .... Gerald.