Ranking And Changing Domains

If you have an existing website, and decide to change the domain
on which it resides, you will lose your current PageRank. The good
news, though, is that by continuing to use the old domain, and using
a 302 redirection command in your .htaccess file, you can maintain
the PageRank of the original site, which will provide a degree of
coverage until the new site has attained a ranking of its own.

This is an excellent reason to choose your domain and its name
carefully at the beginning. By thinking of a website in terms of a
physical location, it is easy to see how the PageRank is related to
the domain. Once you’ve set up shop in a particular location, and
begun to build a customer base, you have associated that location
with your products and services. If, a few months down the road, you
decide to move to a new location, you are quite likely to lose many
of your original customers.

Even though you may post signs and send
out notices, many customers who were accustomed to the original
location will not bother to drive to a different location.
Eventually, these customers and clients may be regained, especially
if you are offering products or services that are unique or providing
a quality that is difficult to find at competitor locations, but it
will take time to regain those those people, and in the meantime you
will have moved forward and begun to build a new customer base.

In the same way, your domain acts as a physical address. And even
though you can set up a redirection to automatically transfer
visitors from the old location to the new one, you are still likely
to lose many of the original visitors for at least a short period of
time. And for search engines, you have effectively opened a new
store at a new location, even if you use redirection. Since each
domain is ranked in its own right, moving to a domain means that your
rank must start over again from scratch.

You’ll still have to notify
all of the sites that maintain backlinks, update directory listings,
and all of the tasks that were undertaken when the original site was
created. It is quite likely that your PageRank will return to normal
faster than the time taken for the original domain, but it will still
be a process that involves building the rank from a zero starting
point.

Article written by SEOnotepad.com