Changing Domain

[Pinlaser]

We have an old domain that we have had registered for many years(pinpoint;asersystems.com) and redirected to our regular domain (which is a short version of our name (pinlaser.com). Management wants to switch and use the longer version as the primary domain for branding purposes.

I have cautioned against this for many reasons:

Need to do 100's of redirects

Potential loss of back links

Most links will now be 301 redirects and not look natural to search engines.

I would appreciate feedback on any and all risks associated with this potential move.

Thanks.

[CleverPhD]

If you did that - now you have 2 URLs customers can reach you.  I know it would help people, but you now have 2 online "brands"/urls.

[Pinlaser]

Good points....but we would still redirect old URL to new URL so they could still type in shorter url to get to homepage.

[CleverPhD]

Technically - yes you can do it.  You can use 301 redirects and make it all work without too much of a hit.  You will get a bit of a hit short term and if you setup all the redirects properly, recover within 3-6 months.

I like Rands recent post to move to moz.com as a nice case study

http://moz.com/rand/10-traffic-graphs-seomoz-moz-domain-migration/

Now - throw out everything I just typed.  You have to consider that your "brand" online is the shorter URL.  People are used to it, they already have habits and bookmarks and emails, etc etc in place.  You could "screw up" your online brand and not need to.  Plus, longer URLs are a pain in the butt.  Why frustrate your users by making them type in a  longer URL?  Why frustrate all the people who want to email you when they have to type out a longer URL?  Why, why why?

Southwest Airlines uses southwest.com, American Airlines uses AA.com, New York Times uses nytimes.com, I could go on, there are big brands that use shorter URLs.   People are lazy, why increase friction when trying to get people to your site.  I know for a fact that people search more often for keywords "NYC $services" vs typing our "New York City $services" (service could be a locksmith or restaurant etc) - why?  Who wants to type all that out when you can just put in NYC?

You could argue about the technical reasons, but what will convince them is if you give them the reasons why customers will not like the new domain,  I think that is your best bet.

[FedeEinhorn]

It wouldn't be an easy task for sure, but if done carefully and following all others previous experiences (like the transition of SEOMoz to Moz), you should be in pretty good shape.

You will however, see a decrease in organic traffic for a few days, but that should return to normal after a few days. Both Google and Bing have an option that allows you to inform them about an URL change.

Just make sure everything is well redirected/canonicalized.

Hope that helps!