I want to shift my website to a new domain name, with my brand name. Would Lose rankings

[StutiTh]

hi,

Currently i have a 18 year old domain name "www.jaipurdentists.com". I wish to shift to a new domain name "www.thaperdental.com". primarily because of two reasons:

1. I have a same name competitor with domain "www.thaperdentalclinic.com", the site gets benefited because of the brand name domain.

2. The new domain name "www.thaperdental.com" is better to remember and pronounce.

Even if I redirect all web-pages, properly to the corresponding web-pages on new site.

Should I go ahead with this? will it result in drop in rankings!

[Xiano]

My initial reaction really revolves around how well you are ranking for "Jaipur Dentists" and how much traffic that is driving. Domain names are not a massive ranking factor any more, but Google may be giving you a bit of a boost for that term.

If you are concerned that your competitor is "stealing" branded traffic, I would consider PPC, as I suspect that even if you change your domain name you will still have a fight on your hands competing.

Also, given that you currently outrank them for your brand (certainly from where I am searching), it may not be worth the risk. I would probably work on why their knowledge graph is showing instead of yours...

[effectdigital]

Most site migrations, whether they involve a redesign or not (or whether they move domain or simply alter existing architecture, e.g: HTTP to HTTPS) will incur a small dip in performance, yes

Usually when you perform a site migration, it's for strategic and not tactical reasons. You're usually thinking of the long term. Your belief is that in the long term, the new domain and / or design / architecture will perform better than the old one(s)

If redirects are not properly handled, you could lose all of your traffic quite easily. If redirects are handled correctly, you're in a much better position but still likely to suffer some small indent in terms of performance (usually not lasting longer than 1-2 months - if you keep producing good content and earning great links)

What you have to remember is, if you always play it safe and never 'evolve', you might incur less cuts and bruises now and then - but you will die faster. As others overtake you through their efforts, you sink and fall behind. It's worth striding out there, taking a few nicks and cuts - to preserve your overall life-span for longer (think of it like regular rigorous exercise, it's painful when you do it but later you see the benefit)

301 redirects an translate up to 100% of your SEO authority from one place to another, but they won't always. If there are too many links to redirects that can make them slightly less effective. If redirects begin to chain (redirects to redirects) or if the wrong type of redirect is used, that can drastically affect the transfer and you could see as little as 0% of the prior SEO equity on your new domain. Another thing, if content is relatively different (in machine terms, think Boolean string similarity comparison - NOT "oh yeah as a person it looks similar to me") on the old and new pages, that can directly obstruct 301 redirect SEO authority transfer. Google has chosen to rank X page, if you replace it with Y content then it becomes a risk to Google. If content is mostly new, it mostly has to prove itself again (and redirects become largely nullified)

To some extent you can get around this by performing backlink amendments. Getting webmasters to change their links to your site, so that they hit the new domain / architecture and not the old one. This means that the backlinks are not flowing through redirects, and thus Google can have more confidence that the new content is just as good (for similar search terms) as the old content was. If many webmasters disagree to update links for you, that could be a sign that your old content was more useful than your new content (so roll back!)

Your new domain, if it hasn't been used before (ever) may be sand-boxed by Google for a few weeks. That can be a normal thing, until Google digests all the redirects, re-linking and your usage of Search Console's change of address tool (which you absolutely should use, but don't mess it up by even one character or you'll cause yourself months-long headaches)

Sometimes if everything goes swimmingly, you can get very lucky and not even see a dip at all. That's not the norm, so don't set all your expectations around that