Should I Change My Domain?

by Tom Peary

Something that I have been asked on numerous occasions recently ‘should i change my domain?’ so I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to talk you through the pros and cons of migrating your domain to a new one.

But first let’s look at why you might want to change your domain name:

1. Rebranding
2. Target a more keyword relevant domain in search
3. Loss of ownership or dropped domain
4. Google manual action or penalty

Changing your domain due to rebranding of your business

Okay this one is probably the most tricky to deal with. Let’s just assume for a second that your current website that you’ve had for years ranks pretty well in search and generates sales/leads from organic traffic. But then for whatever reason your business is going to be rebranded and you want to make sure your customers know who you are and can still find you.

Really the only option that makes commercial sense is to forward your existing domain to your new one but what you will find is that once you migrate your domain the rankings you had will probably disappear. However as long as you’re keeping the site foundations fairly similar, content etc and all of your back links redirect then it will come back.

 

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