Someone please answer this for me.

It would impact your ranking and you most likely would lose your first page ranking.

Why create a 2nd page in the same niche and target the same keywords if your already on page one? Why not target the next highest keywords for the niche or a different niche all together?

My question would be, why did they need to set it up on a new domain?

Sure it might have been a bit more hassle (especially if you have a lot of pages) to set it up on the current domain, but in my mind this is the best route.

Back to your main quesiton though...

This is not something I have ever done and I am a bit nervous about this type of stuff; however, I do hear about other people doing it without a problem - I think.

However, it is not just a case of forwarding you need to make sure that all the links etc are passed on so that all the link juice extra that was going to your old site will be going to your new site.

You might want to look up 401 redirects as that is what might be appropriate. However, I am not totally sure, but I definitely think you need to be doing more than just a basic forward.

I must say that I don't see your rationale for this at all.

If you do what you have planned your ranking with almost certainly fall. Like Humpty Dumpty.

You have an aged domain. That has value. It certainly has more value than a better design.

And SEO optimization? The best SEO optimization (an extra "O" in there by the way) is providing information that people are interested in.

It'll lose a bit of link juice, but it may still hold on to the rankings.

You should read this: 301 Redirect Test: How Much Link Juice are YOU Losing? | SEER Interactive

Yes, it would be impact for the time being propaganated to new domain. Try to use 301 permanent redirect, this is the best way to tell Google that your domain was change permanently

Ok

First of all, if you can avoid domain change, please do so. While good redirection process (getting to this in a minute) will help you keep you SEO factors (i.e. domain age, inbound links, social signals and etc) you will lose Brand recognition and for a 15 years old domain this is not a good thing to loose.


If domain name change is imminent then you need to:

1. Get an excel list of all old domain URLs.
This can be done with Xenu or (better) by searching Google site:yourdomain.com.
Once done scrape them for Title tags (you can use Niels Bosma excel SEO-Tools for that)

2. Get a list of all new domain URLs and also scrape them for Titles.

3. Use both lists to crate a list of manual redirects for each URL. (i.e old URL A -> new URL B).

Titles tags should help you get some idea about each page identity.

If you want, and know how, you can use advanced scraping via XPathOnUrl to also get breadcrumbs and other telling signs.

4. Create a complete redirect map for your site. Never settle for a simple "all URLs to new HomePage redirect". You will be sorry you did.

5. Go to Google WMT and use "Changed of address" to notify Google about the changes made. (This can only be done if both sites are verified)

6. Whisper a little prayer to a deity of your choice.

7. Success

I`ve done this a couple of time for really BIG sites and it always worked perfectly.

Note that in the long-term you do need to be aware of things like:

1. Redirect linkage: Already existing redirects to your old site are once again redirected to new site, and while double redirects are mostly Ok, triple or more can be troublesome... After fact you may need/want to backtrack some of your current redirects.

2. Keeping you redirects live: Server updates, human errors, hacks and etc can remove existing redirect rules from your site and this can be pretty hard to spot.
If in the future, if you see your ranking drop, always remember to go back to you original excel and re-check all rules created. (also easily done via SEO Tools)

Hope this helps

I have done this before, all of my pages lost their rankings first, but then in 2 months, they were back even better.

Why not put the new site on your existing, 15 year old domain and at the same time transfer the old content from there to your new site as a sort of Plan B?

I can't understand why you would simply forward a well performing, aged domain to a brand new one rather than just replacing the content?