Is it worth switching from .net to .com if you own both domain names

[Cordstrap]

For over 20 years the company I work for has used www.company.net as their TLD, because we could not register www.company.com at that time. However, currently we also own www.company.com

www.company.com has a 301 re-direct to www.company.net  We are a global company, and market leader in our industry. Our company name is associated with the product we make, and our competitors use our company name as their targeted keywords to attract visitors to their sites because our company name is synonym with the product we and they make.

As we are a global company we also have lots of TLDcc's. The email address of all our employees worldwide have a .net email address extension.

Would you advice switching from www.company.net to www.company.com??? And if so, what would be the reasons for this switch. Would it only be for branding purposes?

Looking forward to some insights before taking on such an invasive switch (because of the switch of all email addresses of employees worldwide).

Best regards,

Astrid Groeneveld

[avassa]

Astrid,

David is right; you will put almost the entire backlinks' profile of .net at risk. The quantum of the risk and the subsequent results are factors that nobody would be able to predict with perfection.

[mrdavidingram]

Hi Astrid,

It could be argued that .com domains correlate better with higher rankings that .net domains, however there is no certainty as to whether the search engines use this domain distinction as a ranking factor (and if so, how much weight it holds in their overall algorithm)

It could also be argued that a .com domain carries more trust from a brand perspective, so there is an overall marketing case to be put forward for switching.

However...

From an SEO point of view, any potential benefit you'd receive from switching to a .com (which in my opinion would be very little) would be counter-acted (and possible outweighed) by the link juice you'd lose from 301'ing your existing domain and all the links it's received over the years. There is no exact figure on what kind of link power you'd lose, but have a read on the test on losing link juice from a 301 redirect.

So as an SEO excercise, I would say you'll receive very little benefit from switching, and more likely you would see rankings drop in the short-medium term. It could be a different story from a marketing perspective, but whoever is making the decision should be aware of the SEO consequences.

Thanks

David