301 Redirect Question

[minim]

I currently have a website, let's call it xyz.com which gets about 500 uniques per day, has ~50 backlinks in Google and I'm targetting keyword 'abc'.

I therefore want to buy the domain abc.com because this would hopefully help it rank higher in the SERPs because it has the keyword in the domain name. However, I don't want to start a whole new website, building backlinks and stuff again. I simply want to transfer all the backlinks, SERP ranking and content to my new website abc.com with a 301 redirect.

What will happen if I do that? Will I keep all the backlinks and the SERP ranking? Obviously these will fluctuate and I would expect to take it ~1-2 weeks until it gets to where xyz.com was, but will it get there eventually ?

Also, what else do I loose? :love-smiley-085:
btw, all the domain names and figures given in the example are made up

 

[ambirex]

301 is what you want when you move the site permanently. as seen at:
How to: Move a Website...Should You Fear 301 Redirects Hurting Your Rankings? : SEO Book.com

But why not keep up both sites until all the search engine traffic has changed?

 

[minim]

Okay, had a browse through that and all seems good - my site will have about 500 pages then so I guess we'll see.

Thanks for the link!

What do you mean by keeping both sites up? Won't they get penalized for duplicate content then ?

 

[blueoceanwave]

Using 301 rocks if done properly. and it'll transfer all of the google juice too