Changing Domain Names

[rmalm]

A few years back I purchased www.randymalm.com and recently had a website built using that URL. Anyway, I have found another url that is available that I would love to use, it is short and keyword specific.

Will it hurt me in the search engines to have www.randymalm.com point to the new url? Should I just have the new url point to www.randymalm.com?



At this moment I have very little PR (as seen in google webmasters), but I am coming up very high in yahoo and msn.


Thanks

[Calculator]

You should pick one to use as your main domain. Redirect the other domain to your main domain.

Don't have both working on the site at the same time as this can cause problems with search engines. Redirecting the domain can also hurt your search engine rankings as all the links go to the old domain. With a proper redirect there is a good chance it will only be a temporary hit. Start getting links to your new domain right away also.

Here's an example using www.maindomain.com and www.olddomain.com. When you type in www.olddomain.com it should immediately redirect to www.maindomain.com using a 301 (permanent) redirect. You'll probably have to have someone technical set this up if you don't know how.

Here's a real life example where it's done correctly:
http://www.googel.com/

[Memphis]

If you have original content on both you could simply have the lessor of the two have links to the other. In this way you could take advantage of SERP positioning for both.

If you were wanting to move the content of the older site to the new, you could have a redirect as stated above go to the newer domain. With the newer domain having in the shorter keyword specific name it might make more scenes to use that for your marketing efforts.

[webmaster]

The short answer is yes, changing your domain means starting over

[Calculator]

If you have original content on both you could simply have the lessor of the two have links to the other. In this way you could take advantage of SERP positioning for both.

Two sites is always better than one if you have the resources to maintain them both.

[ccachor]

http://www.bigoakinc.com/seo-article...ect-Google.php

In short, this happens all the time and modern search engines have built this into their software. As Calculator stated, 301 redirect is what you want. Remember having identical content on two separates site may flag yourself as spam.

[David Abernathy]

Two sites is always better than one if you have the resources to maintain them both.

Amen to Calculator's comments on having more than one site!

There are lots of reasons to maintain more than one website! Having redundancy with your websites allows you to select from the best of both or several website solutions.

For example - many here know that I am a huge advocate of the REW template sites - I will spare you the list of great attributes of these sites. At the same time, I always encourage agents to use the Point2 agent websites for the benefits that their systems provide. I have found that each of the sites has enough unique strengths to justify working on them.

Best of luck in your efforts. If you decide to work with just one. Keep the current site going until your new site starts to get similiar placements as your current site. When we tried to redirect with 301's in the past - our experience was that it did very little (if any) to reduce the time it took to get the new website to place well...

Dave

[Brian Mc]

I think I have a problem here. I was planning to 301 redirect our 'mywife .com' domain to my Prude template site permanently. I planned this under the impression of stuff I had read that stated the new domain would still get credit for any links to the old. But reading Webmaster's post above also this I found on the net: "In addition to the redirect I would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website." I am thinking that my original thoughts were incorrect.

This is not good for me as I was planning to pimp the original domain name everywhere with backlinks. So should I just use the original domain name 'mywife. com' for print advertising and be creating all my backlinks on the net to her 'my.wife/prudega .com/prude_GA/index.asp?acc=12345' link? Thanks for any thoughts.

[David Rocci]

I've heard from a SEO consultant that blank re-directs can actually hurt your ranking. Is there any merit to that statement?

[Auliya]

Why dont you take the Randymalm.com site and make it into a stand alone blog that would match and go along with your other site? This would mean starting over as morgan says, moving your current site to the new domain and whatnot, but IMHO it would be more beneficial to you in the long run to set up 2 separate sites with unique content rather than forwarding one domain to another. The reason i picked Randymalm.com to be the blog is simply because it has a personal feel to the domain and Blogs generally have a more personal feel to them rather than a business feel. Of course the specifics are up to you. But essentially, the more ways to attract clients the better, and having a matching Site and Blog on Their own domains will add not only good links to each other once they are picked up and given placement, but also a lot of fresh information in many different formats that will attract different types of buyers.