How risky is it to change the main domain for a website?

Hey,

I did this for this site : Bistro Verde | The Best Seafood Restaurant in AberdeenBistro Verde

I think their old one was http://bistro-verde.co.uk and then that other one became available.

This site was pretty easy to change over because there was only about 10 links to the whole of the old site, and we manually changed them, lol!

It seems like quite a minefield changing a domain. If there are not many pages for the old site you can do a straight up redirect from each old page to each new one - sure there is a better way but we only had about 6 pages!

I know there are options like putting stuff in .htaccess - my experience of this is DONT - maybe for 1 or 2 pages but that is it... I tried it with my record label site intelligentaudio.net | and any more than about 20 things in my htaccess practically crippled the loading time.

Maybe you can put stuff in robots.txt - rules - sorry Im not being more helpful but if you google these things you can find more accurate info! :-)

Definitely submit a new site map and do stuff in google webmasters, they have lots of info of what they want to see happen...

and you can check progress every week or month too to check they are indexing stuff correctly...

If the old site is a big site though, you should be careful but check out those things above and hopefully you will get some better replies from more experienced webmasters! :-)

Check google's instructions for changing a domain name. Most significantly make sure you put in redirects for each of the existing pages, so that both Google and anyone who has saved a link gets redirected to a page on the new domain.

Although its difficult changing domain name, it can be worthwhile, and doing it sooner rather than later is advised.

Not really. Basically what you want to do is go to Google Webmaster Tools and tell them that you're redirecting your domain (here's a good resource for how to do that: Moving your site - Webmaster Tools Help)
Good luck!

Jungl is not correct. You can not redirect a domain using Google Webmaster Tools. Google does not control your server. The only thing you can do with Google is to fix the canonical www vs non-www problem. It is a lousy "fix" and this should be done on the server anyway,

What you have described is nothing more than making a new domain the primary domain name and having the current one secondary. This is what you should do:

1) Add the new domain name to the hosting account. Two domains will now be listed for the same hosting space. Set the new one as the "primary" or "preferred" domain.

2) Log on to the Registrar account for the new domain name. In the DNS records, type in the IP addresses of the DNS servers of your hosting account.

3) Page requests for the old domain name will automatically be returned with the preferred domain (you will see this in the browser address bar), so in this particular situation you don't need to make any changes to the .htaccess file.

However, it is not true that adding stuff to this file slows down hosting. The .htaccess file is loaded into server memory, and anything you put into this file has to be there. I have run servers with 350K of redirect directives and the server ran just fine in a shared hosting environment.

You can expect a 10-15% or so drop in SERPs while the old URLs are cleaned out and are replaced with the new ones. Google (and the others) will also scrutinize your content very carefully for keyword-riddled text and other violations of Google Webmaster Guidelines, so your ranking may change anyway.

Personally, I have no idea WHY a local company would want to change their domain that has TX in it. Google still is not doing a great job at only giving me a Colorado companies when I want one. I LOOK for titles or domains with Colorado in the name. I think your asking the wrong question..It's NOT How I change it but SHOULD I change it...Use the corporate name in a blog...or YT channel.
My 2 cents!

I want to thank everyone for their responses. I learned some new things.