I'm considering changing my clients URL. Reasons being the following: - We're rebranding his company - Currently, the domain has the small town, outside of the city, in the name. However, for his specific practice, he generally owns the market for his niche locally, and doesn't have competitors for a much larger radius than just the small town the domain is in. So instead we want to include the city's name instead, which is available. - The domain would be the same as the branding
Upon launch of the new domain, we'll also be launching a newly built website, new sitemap, URL structure, everything.
My thoughts were to redirect the entire domain to the new one as a 301 redirect, THEN redirect to HTTPS.
All older pages would redirect to the page that most clearly matches the topic, or to a 404 page.
According to Moz, all link equity would be passed. (Short article here: https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo ) However, it seems risky.
What is the true risk?