Hi,

Just registered obviously. Was looking for a good active webmaster forum and I believe I'm on a good spot.

To the topic. We want to change our name with the domain name and we're wondering what effects we will see. We get some 60,000 unique visitors per day. So it's a major impact of course.

What can we expect to see in terms of Google traffic, well general traffic as well. Of course we'll use redirects from the old domain, but I don't think we can avoid big traffic/money losses.

If anybody did this before or if you know what we could see from this, please do let me know. Would appreciate that a lot.

Thanks,

If you change your domain name then all your promotion for site will be lost. You would be starting over again. Its like starting out with a new domain. You cant transfer over SEO / SEM you will have to rebuild. Why would you want to change your domain name if its doing so well?

Well, our name Strategy Informer reflects to old times when we were just covering Strategy games. Now we're covering all games and it's confusing everybody...

Major move... So not even redirects would help more then just on short term basis?

Thank you,

But keep in mind please that we wont delete the old domain and the site on it. All of its pages would just redirect to all of new domain pages. Individually. Each page would go to the right page on the new domain. So a clean redirect.

That still doesn't matter?

I just changed my domain name on one of my websites. The previous site had a PR 5 and tons of backlinks and SERPS...the change hurt for the first month but after that things have actually picked back up (find out on PR update). If the new domain name is a lot more marketable it can be worth it but if it isn't it might be best to stick with the old one. It's not the end of the world but you have to make sure everything is reoptimised and build links quickly to stay an authority website.

Hi,

What is the URL of your old web domain? gamefriends sounds great.

Did you use redirects from page to page?

What do you mean reoptimised? We're doing really good for a lot of pages on Google, so I don't think we need to change anything in that regard.

Thanks,

As long as you have the other site up you will still get all that traffic. The big thing is to work on the new sites SEO. Once that is done you should see an increase of traffic.
Your first site has 60,000 visitors so all those will be directed to the new site and now the new site once it starts ranking can get 10,000 or whatever number. So you will be better off. You will be routing two sites to one.
Dont sweat it.