Changing your URL? Impact on rankings?

[wellnesswooz]

I have been thinking about changing our webadres for quite a while but I'm too afraid of the impact on my SERP. I understand I would need to use the Google Change of Address tool & 301 redirects. Am I missing something?

What is your experience with changing the URL of a website? How has this impacted your SERP? In the past I heard someone say it will damage the linkjuice by 20%. Is that accurate?

If you change the URL, is there a blank period of where your old site nor your new site are indexed? Or does Google handle this transition well?

[grasshopper]

Hi wooz,

You're absolutely correct - implement 301 redirects from your old URLs to their equivalent URLs on your new domain, and then declare your "Change of Address" in Google Webmaster Tools.

There's quite a bit more detail covered here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105

Matt Cutts has said that there's no loss or leakage of link juice through 301 redirects: http://searchengineland.com/google-pagerank-dilution-through-a-301-redirect-is-a-myth-149656

The main issues that I've seen with sites losing traffic due to domain migrations are usually due to one or both of the following factors:

1. 301 redirects are not properly set up.  Only a small portion of URLs from the old domain are correctly 301 redirected to their equivalents on the main domain.  As a result, old URLs that have incoming links go 404, and the link equity is not transferred to the new domain.
2. The new site has vastly different information architecture than the old site.  It is larger, structurally different, or targets new keyword spaces.  As a result, there is not a 1:1 correlation between the old site and the new site, and the new domain can't compete as effectively in the new keyword spaces as the old domain could compete in the previous keyword spaces.

Google is generally quite quick at picking up the Change of Address notification and applying it to your new domain.  There shouldn't be any "lag time" where your old domain has disappeared from the SERPs, and has not been replaced by your new domain.

Hope that helps!