Impact of moving all the domain from .net to .com

[Adviso]

Hi,

We are thinking of moving a domain from a   .net  extension to a .com because of internal political reason.

It's a french website with 3 000 pages.The organic trafic is  65 % from France and 35 % from Canada. We have decent rankings and we have around 150 000 organic visits/month.

For sure,if we move the site, we will do all the rigth 301 redirect. We will also use Google Webmaster Tools to tell the new location of the site.

But even if we do all the best practices. What would be the impact of changing the extension.

Is anyone had some experience with this ? I will really like to have your opinion on this.

Thanks

Rick

[BTeubner]

Hola,

We've moved a number of sites for similar political reasons. It's always frustrating as an SEO!

We almost always have seen some drop-off for obvious reasons. Sometimes that drop-off has been less 5%, other times closer to 30% depending on the precautions that business owners were willing to take. Sounds like you're going to do redirects and do the webmaster tools request. 2 tips:

• Plan to hold on to the .net domain for a long time and keep the redirects in place. Our worst results were situations where for some reason, the business owner would not (refused to/could not/whatever reason) hold on to the old domain name.
• Try to find a feasible/scalble way to get your top-linkers to move to the new domain. In a perfect world, you'd get most your inbound links updated. This can take some time but seems to help minimize the impact and be better in the long-run. This is an absolute waste of times in some cases (way too inefficient) but if you have or can establish solid relationships, get those links updated!

Best of luck. It's not an ideal situation but usually isn't the end of the world if you're in it for the long haul (unless your in a crazy competitive market)!

[EGOL]

I would move just to get off of the .net.

[Adviso]

Thanks Rick

Really appreciate that you share your experience !

[irvingw]

changing from .com to .net is the same as changing your domain name. It should be done only when absolutely necessary, unless the current site is not established and not ranking.