About 11 years ago my company built its online presence, and its domain name based on the specific industry sector we were in (let’s say it’s sanitationproductsonline.com) . Nowadays we’ve branched out into more general areas and usually refer to ourselves by more generic-sounding initials. I was wondering whether it’s feasible to use a new domain (eg spo.com) and do a 301 redirect of all pages on sanitationproductsonline.com to spo.com.
I’ve been told that, these days, a 301 redirect transfers all of its link juice to the new page. So would it have any negative effect on our Google rankings? We’ve build up some very good positions for some keywords.
It’s worth noting that the keywords in the domain aren’t even very representative these days, so I’m not bothered about losing out on searches for ‘sanitation products’.
What you heard is right. A 301 redirect is the best way to handle this situation. It means that anyone who has bookmarked your old domain will automatically find the new one, and - as you say - any links to the old domain will continue to be of benefit.
OK, that’s good reading, and it’s great to know that there is a Google-approved way of doing it.
But does anyone have any experience of whether or not it affects rankings within SERPS?
I’ve only used it once. I had a site which covered two quite different topics and I split it into two different sites, each with a new domain. I used Google’s “change of address” facility to redirect the main business of the site, and left the other domain to take its chances - although I used a 301 redirect to send all the old pages to the correct new domain and page. Both sites improved slightly in the SERPs.