I agree with BJ and Fathom. There is no reason why you can't have both the old and the new site going initially. As long as there is no duplicate content or duplicate coding profile issues. One thing that I have never understood is the need for the so-called and much hyped "launch" concept. For some reason the bean counters still seem to think that people are just lined up ready to go to the brand new site as soon as it goes up. And they think this process needs to be done in an all or none manner as fast as possible. Everytime I have seen this done it has been a disaster. Something completely unexpected always comes up.
Someone else said make sure that whatever you do it can be undone relatively easy. I completely agree. Slowly migrate the old site into the new one as you see the rankings and traffic ramp up for the newly branded site. Do everything in a very slow and measured manner.
Rebranding with a completely new domain name is by far the most difficult and unpredictable thing that any
SEO specialist has to go through. No matter what you do with redirects you can't change all the external links on all the non-search engine websites that all contribute to the overall popularity index of your current domain. You will lose this with a brand new domain.
This is a good quote (below). Most physical businesses would never do something like this and it applies to websites as well. Because building a new website is soooo much cheaper than building a new physical store why would you not take advantage of using both?
Quote:
Originally Posted by fathom
A new domain is like closing an old store and starting it in a new place (but all the adverts which help bring in new customers all have them go to an empty location... and lost business (same thing here).
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