Question : SEO Domain Change

Hi,

I have a question that hopefully someone will be able to answer.

I think its fair to say that keywords with the domain name and also in the filename of the different pages helps. So Im aware that the best way to change filenames is using a 301 redirect via an HTACCESS file or using ISAPI Rewrite.

But what happens if the company itself is called something completely unrelated to the keyword - for example, www.joebloggs.com is a specialist of window glazing.

What I want to do is buy a new domain called www.windowglazingspecialist.com and make that redirect to the existing www.joebloggs.com site in a way that the new domain to be indexed will be the windowglazingspecialist.com domain - i dont want to run 2 websites with same content. This should help with SEO ranks right?

I hope this is understood.... Need advice.

Thanks,

Ben

Answer : SEO Domain Change

I know your intention isn't to fool the search engines, but thats what trying to get a different url to show up for your site, or getting one site ranked that forwards visitors to another site would be essentially be doing.

There may be sites ranked at the top that all have the keyword in the domain, but chances are its their backlinks that got them to the top, not their domain name... in Google especially.  MSN probably places the most value in domain keywords, but even they "seemed" to have devalued this sometime last year.  At least thats what I saw happen to my keyword domains that were ranked without backlinks.

From May 2008: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-yahoo-microsoft-seo-influence-of-keywords-in-domain-names/6955/

Best practices when moving your site - Google Webmaster Blog
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html