Renaming site, moving domain after 3 yrs. Should I reconsider?

Question

After recently announcing it, one of my readers with a background in website management sent me an email saying that I should reconsider moving my domain from [keyword]news.org to [same keyword]lab.com.

It is a content-heavy news site around products that I hope to eventually build into a more comprehensive authority for the [keyword] industry I'm covering w/ B2B services, merchandise, etc. The current domain is a bit generic & I think the new one will be more marketable.

Relevant stats:

• 320k-350k pv's/month
• Google brings in 39% and Yahoo/Bing 4% of traffic
• 10-11% of monthly search strings contains " news"

SEOMoz Open Site Explorer stats:

• Page authority: 65/100
• Domain authority: 58/100
• Linking root domains: 226
• Total links: 35,700

I am familiar with what I need to do as far as 301 redirects, etc. I was assuming that I'd be ok after following Google's recommended procedures but now I am not so sure.

Answer 1

Two Points:

1. Exact match keyworded domains, while powerful now, will be less-so in the future. Google's web-spam team has already indicated this.
2. If it ain't broke - don't fix it. Really, it's the content that will win moving forward, not the domain name (unless the domain is unique like Twitter/Google/Yahoo/Techchrunch/etc).

Answer 2

Mike Hudson has all very good points. Another point is that Google newer domains as more likely to be spam so there is a chance you will lose some of your Page Authority with Google for a while because they are unsure if they can trust you.