Top Reasons not to change your Domain Name

When building a website for the first time many companies like to test the water and plan to revamp the website after a few months once they have some feedback and data whether it's worth throwing more money at it. Search engine optimisation can start as soon as a website has gone live so these changes may take place during the project and one of the changes that can be considered is to change the domain name of the website. This is a huge no-no for SEO, although the content on the site may stay exactly the same the new domain will show as a completely new website to Google, especially if that domain hasn't been used before. This means that you will have to start from scratch with your off-page optimisation.

-No backlinks; your new domain won't have any backlinks pointing to it so you will have to spend time and money to attain backlinks again to make your site look authoritive

-No PageRank; in relation to the lack of backlinks comes the lack of PageRank. Changing the URL can cause a website to lose all PageRank until Google re-evaluates which can take around 6 months

-Loss of rankings & traffic; All of the current page 1 results will be pointing to your old website so unless a redirect is setup properly then you won’t receive any traffic. Even if there is a redirect, the old rankings will start to drop off and the new website won't have any to keep your traffic levels consistent

-Brand awareness; Your existing customers will be at the least confused by your change of name when searching for your website. You will need to re-brand everything and start again to promote your new brand, from an internet marketing perspective you can lose a huge proportion of potential customers

If you are looking to change your domain name, contact our SEO specialists for advice and remember that each search engine optimisation project is different so what may have worked for someone else may not work for your website.