SEO penalty for changing domains by simply switching DNS on Wordpress and adding 301s server-side?

[dfolwell]

Working on a domain change for a client. They're hosted on Wordpress and their developer wants to simply switch out the DNS for the new domain to point to wordpress, and then have the old domain use 301s to redirect to the new domain. The url structure will be the same, but there will be no CMS connected to the old domain after the switch.

Is this dangerous for SEO? A significant portion of their customers are from organic traffic and losing SEO value would be very bad.

[davebuts]

Hi David,

Not having a CMS on the old site will not cause you any issues.

The main thing you need is the 301 redirects to the new domain. You should also make sure that the redirects from the old domain are redirecting to the corresponding page on the new domain.
IE. You shouldn't be redirecting all pages from the old domain to the homepage on the new domain.

You might see some decreases in organic traffic for a week or two after the change, but it should pick up to its previous levels once search engines have properly crawled and indexed everything again.

Cheers,

David