Aged domain and 301 redirect? (11 year old domain)

[RCDesign74]

Hey everyone,

I'm about to launch a new website for an accounting firm.

They currently have a website, which has an 11 year old domain.

They are doing very well locally for SEO, and i'm guessing it's because of the aged domain, as their website is very badly built, and contains almost no content.

They would like to launch the new site with a simpler, easier to remember domain.

If i launch the new site, point the aged domain using a 301 redirect, and do redirects for all of the old pages to the newer versions of them, is there a chance the company will lose their current SEO rankings?

Thanks!

[Matt-Williamson]

Well what I would say is that when you do a 301 redirect from one domain to another you will lose some of the link juice that has been gained (a 301 passes around 90-99% of juice), so there is chance that when you do this you may see a difference in your SEO rankings. However if done correctly the impact is likely to be minimal and there are plenty of us that have done this successfully and it has worked out for the better. Remember as you said the website is poorly optimised and you are going to be pointing to a new site that has been optimised sensibly and will contain more content, so long term you are on to a winner and you should see improvements in search rankings and traffic generated by your site. Also remember online marketing and SEO is about the long term goals, as well as quick fixes and low hanging fruit that can be picked up, so explain this to the accounting firm and explain how your strategy will cause minimum impact and in the long run it will work to their businesses advantage.

Hope this helps - remember when you do your 301 redirect and tell Google in Google Webmaster Tools that your site has moved it does take time for the search engines to catch up...

[RCDesign74]

Thanks for the reply Matt.

The link juice isn't even really the big worry here, as the current site only has 10 backlinks haha.

Are the benefits of the domain age passed along with link juice?

Sorry if these questions are a little redundant, but I really want to minimize any issues with the launch for the client

Thanks again!

[Matt-Williamson]

No problem Rob - domain age won't be passed through a 301 redirect

However in relation to the age of a domain and how it impacts your ranking have a look at this interesting Q&A from a couple of months ago -

http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-does-your-urls-age-affect-your-ranking

I think you will be fine if you create a 301 redirect from the old domain and make sure you take the time to build a decent natural looking link profile and have optimised the site for the visitor and not the search engines. Taking into account all the on-page factors without going overboard....

[RCDesign74]

Great!

Thanks for pointing me to that other thread as well, tons of great info.

Thanks again Matt!