Switching from .info to .net

Marketing
1

About a year ago, I purchased the domain name www.marijuanagrowguide.info to place my marijuana grow guide content website. Since that time, it has steadily been rising in search engine position, and is currently one of my most consistent adsense earners.

That being said, it was recently time to renew the domain name and I noticed the .net of the same domain name was available for registration. I had always felt that perhaps the fact the domain name was a .info was one of the reasons the site had not performed even better and now that I have the .net, I am considering switching permanently to a .net.

But I was a little afraid of the impact this might have on SE ranking. So right now, I have the .net forwarding to the .info, but what I want to do is rebrand the website to be the .net, and forward the .info to the .net.

So my first question is: Will this switch cause all my inlinks to .info to be discounted, thus hurting the SE ranking of the website?

And also: Do .net websites typically rank higher than .info websites, all else equal?

2

  1. 301 redirect all the old site pages to the new site if you don’t want to lose any rankings (assuming everything else is equal of course)

  2. Google says extensions have no effect but I still, deep down inside, have a gnawing suspicion that infos don’t rank as well due to the fact that they are incredibly cheap and thus are often used as throwaway domains all the time. Can’t prove it though, maybe they don’t rank as well because people use them as throwaway domains so they don’t spend the time on link building and the such for them or maybe they do rank as well.

Sorry not much help on point 2 lol