You'll loose alexa rank & all your organic traffic, coz search engines will consider it as a newly added to the web, & one strange thing is: what I experienced about changing domain after several months is: Google adsense suddenly gave a reason that my new site has copied content, & actually those content belonged to my old site. Google will consider both sites are different.

However you can do it if you have lot of traffic from social network & other referrals(by redirection), but organic traffic is bound to be lost. After a month or two you'll grow back by your old referral links though.

A domain name does more than just help you rank: it helps build confidence in your visitors. If your domain name is short, snappy and memorable, you could bring in more repeat visitors (and repeat visitors convert at a higher rate than first-time visitors). If your domain name is unique, then the visitor will think “I’m dealing with a proper company here”. That’s what you should be aiming for. If you have quality content on your site and are following best practices for adding new material with some regularity, you can rest assured that in the long run your new site will pop right into the search engine and continue its climb up the rankings to help your customers find you.

If you've had the domain for that long - and unless the search engines have blacklisted it - I would say stick with it.

After panda and penguin, the name of the domain is not as important ( though not completely unimportant) as the content you put in.

The value of a aged domain to a new one can be immense. Just make sure your posts are optimized for both humans and search engines by using the right keywords.

Best,

Rezbi

http://directanddigitalmarketing.com/

I don't think there will be huge impact on the traffic. Well, if you are talking about direct traffic, a 301 redirect will simply send the visitor to the new site. If you are talking about search traffic, the link juice will naturally goes into the new domain, so there will no adverse impact on the search traffic.

Okay this is important. Wasn't certain which forum to post this kind of brainstorming to but I like and trust yahoo answers so thought might post this here.

I have a self-hosted blog and site. It gets a good amount of traffic (nothign to some people, but feels accomplished and successful for my standards). I have given this a lot of thought and might change the top-level domain... so the site oldsite.com would become newsite.com. I can accomplish that easily or superficially with some kind of redirect and I have migrated blog content (blog has been going for 8 years so it has, at least imho, a good amount of positive momentum and is more of a site really). Anyways... i feel the newsite.com may be more appropriate.

How would switching to newsite.com (through a redirect? ) effect site traffic. If it would cause traffic to strangely plummet or effect alexa ranking I'd be uncertain about switching it (but then again if I feel more centred with newsite.com content on it might itself bring more traffic).

thanks.