Over the past year we have worked with a number of organizations that have chosen to relocate their sites from an existing domain to a new domain. One of the questions that always comes up early in the process is “how much traffic are we going to lose?” It is an excellent question and not an easy one to answer, but in today’s column I am going to explore that exact question.

Here are some of the types of changes that can have an impact on traffic or rankings.

Domain change. Any change in the domain, such as a move from http://www.old-domain.com to http://www.new-domain.com. The most common reason for doing this is a branding change of some sort. An existing business may be changing its branding, or one business entity may have been acquired by another one and the two sites are being merged.

Structural changes or URL changes. These are changes where the content that lives on a given URL on old-domain.com (such as about-us.html) gets moved to a different URL (such as about-us.php). URL changes can be “wholesale” (change nearly all or all of them), “heavy” (change a lot of them), “moderate” (change some of them), “light” (change only a few), or not done as all if you simply copy the exact site structure from one domain to another.

Structural changes often happen as a result of a change in the technology used to implement a site. For example, a business may have been using Cold Fusion as a content management system, and then switches to using ASP. The other major reason for structural changes is when wholesale content changes are made.

Content changes. Changes to the content on pages can happen without changing the URL structure of the site, by simply rewriting content on the pages, or something that causes structural changes to the site. As with URL changes, these can also be heavy, moderate, light, or not done at all.

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