Losing Rank As A Result Of Domain Change

[ClayPotCreative]

I have a client who is wishing to switch from an established, but unattractive domain, to a domain he just purchased that is more attractive. For example purposes, his existing site is "His-Company-Website.com" and the site he just purchased and wants to transfer to is "HisCompanyWebsite.com." The only difference is the old site has hyphens in between the words and the new one does not.

He is not making this choice from an SEO perspective, but more of a "I don't want to keep saying all those hyphens when telling people about my website." But he said he doesn't want to lose his search engine rankings as a result. So he knows this won't necessarily increase his ranks, but doesn't want them to drop as a result.

When speaking with him, I thought we could simply toss in a 301 redirect at the root level and pipe them over to the other site, but he wanted some actual proof. I went back to look at what I thought would be a similar case that I did earlier in the year (transferring from a .net to a .com) and noticed that we did see some rather substantial drops in at least traffic, so I am not so sure about this plan any longer.

So my questions for my far more insightful colleagues...

1. What would be your suggestion on this problem? Transition to the more user friendly domain or stick with the unfriendly domain?

2. If he does elect to transition to the new domain, what all can I do to preserve his search engine rankings?

3. Should a rankings and/or traffic drop be predicting when completing this?

Thank you all in advance. Any other tidbits anyone has to offer would be great. Looking forward to your replies.

[StreamlineMetrics]

1. I would suggest moving the domain to the non-hyphenated version.

2. 301 redirect the old domain to the new domain. Submit the new domain to GWT and change the preferred domain in GWT from the the old domain to the new domain.

3. You will probably see a temporary drop in organic traffic when you do the switch since it takes some time for Google to update the site's pages in its index. But in the long run, the new domain should return to the rankings the old domain had and any drop in organic traffic should be minimal. And the fact that the client specifically said he is tired of telling people about going to his domain name with hyphens in it is causing him a problem, then that's all the more reason to move to the non-hyphenated domain.

[Brian-H]

Hi You can find a similar question and answer here

http://www.seomoz.org/q/client-rebranding-q-on-redirecting-complete-site

and this one http://www.seomoz.org/q/redirecting-2-aged-site-to-brand-spanking-new-one

[TakeshiYoung]

301 redirects do not pass all the link juice, so you will lose a bit of link value if you use a 301 redirect. If you don't want to lose any juice, you can try contacting the sites with the highest authority links, and asking them to link to your new site.

However, even if you are able to get all the new links pointed to the new site, I would expect to see a rankings drop, at least in the short term as Google tries to figure things out.

So expect to see a rankings drop if you redirect, and weigh the loss in SEO traffic versus having a better, more brandable domain name.  You'll probably end up losing some link juice in the transition, but you can always redouble your link building efforts afterwards to rebuild your link profile.

[Brian-H]

I would expect if he used the redirect domain function in google webmaster tools it would minimise this.