New Domain. Drop Rank?

[tippmann316]

I currently have an ecommerce website that I have run for the last 2 years, and in that two years I have only achieved an Alexa ranking of 480,104 and we have not really gathered that many backlinks. But we rank number one and number two on all major search engines for some really important keywords.
We are considering a name change to better describe our expanding company and this would involve a new domain. Same website, just a different domain. Will this trash our ranking for those particular keywords?
As stated earlier our website structure will not change, it's just that the domain will. We will still of coarse forward the old domain to the new domain.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[webhost1]

You will have to redirect your old site to the new domain or you may lose all the rankings you got.

[hostBrain]

You're going to see some kind of a dip in rankings.
Make sure you do the 301 redirect and contact all websites that link to your old domain, to have them switch to your new one.

Should ease the pain...

[stymiee]

Use this code to do that:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?old-domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.new-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

[incrediblehelp]

I would greatly re-consider this change. All of the backlinks are "attached" to this current domain. Changing it should be only for a very, very, very good reason. Sure 301 redirect will work, but their is no way to tell how well.

Also Alexa rankings mean nothing, so don't worry as long as you have the traffic you are targeting.

[Maloney]

I wouldn't do it unless it was absolutely necessary. There probably will be a dip, but that may come back over time. As mentioned above, make sure to 301 everything and get in contact with as many of the websites linking to you as possible (to change to the new link).

[idansh]

redirect your old site to the new domain is a must as said before