Transfer webshop to other domain. Will there be a huge visit/sales drop?

[Seeders]

A client of main has a specific domain for their webshop, separately from the brand the domain. The brand domain has much more authority (according to SEOMoz), so the conclusion in an other topic was that it would be better to move the entire webshop to the same domain as the branddomain.

Like moving www.webshopdomain.com to www.branddomain.com/webshop

Of course all categories and important pages will have a 301 to give through the build up authority.

Does anybody have experience with this? I believe in the end this will be much better because all authority will be build up at the same domain.
But I am afraid of a drop in the beginning. If there will be a sales drop, I really must give my client notice of this...

I hope somebody has done this before..

[Seeders]

Thanks Reload Media and Deb Dulal Dey.

The job is done (for a while now) and the results are even better than hoped for.
In the beginning, there was a little (very little) drop, but within two weeks they climed up.

Now we have doubled the organic visitors!

So, it turned out great

[Debdulal]

_Honestly speaking you are going to take huge risk here. I hope the www.webshopdomain.com is faring well in the SERP and since you are going to move the entire domain in the directory structure, it will still lose some link juice and PR value. And yes of course, some of the rankings of your website is going to suffer. And may take some time to recover the ranking. So, it is up to you. _

[IainReloadMedia]

Hi Gerjan,

You're doing the right thing. There is a risk of losing some rankings with any site migration. Your job as an SEO is to reduce these and let the client know there is some short term risk.

301's are the main thing but if you follow this check list you'll be ok...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3546-SEO-Site-Migration-Checklist

Hope it goes well.

Thanks

Iain - Reload Media