How badly will I screw a domain name over if I...
 

I have a website that I have been running for 10 years and to be honest the site sucks. Everything about it needs an upgrade but the name. It has a PR3 ranking. I am building a new website on a better server with a temporary domain name right now until things are 100% ready for the new site to go live.

I was going to keep the old domain name and replace it with my temp one on the new site but i am just learning now that we might be down for 2 days until the DNS kicks in and also that does not give us any testing time, cause of the merchant, ssl, and something else my programmer told me is currently set up to my temporary domain name. So I am getting told my best option is to use my temporary domain name as the main name now and just point the PR3 rating domain name by masking it.

Now will this screw me over with my PR3 domain name if I do this? or will it not make a difference?

Ya got a few options ...

1. Go ahead and change the DNS .. I have being finding, at least from Godaddy, that the changes usually resolve in less than two hours

2. Meta tag forward the domain
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh"CONTENT="5; URL=autoforward_target.html">
//* 5 = # of second before refresh

3. Forward the domain at the registra. (ie Godaddy, Network Solutions ect.)

or

Do 2 then Do 1 ...... no lost visitors.

Hey thanks for the tips :)

What is a PR3 raning and how do you check? Thanks

I've been finding DNS changes are usually fast too.

if you're concerned about DNS taking a long time, shorten the TTL (Time To Live) in your older domain's zone file a while before you make the actual cut-over. The TTL value tells other DNS servers how long to cache the zone.

if you have access to a Linux or UNIX system (or even cygwin) and can run the 'dig' command, you can see how long your TTL is set to from the command line:

dig domainname.com SOA

domainname.com. 86400 IN SOA ns1.foo.com. dns.foo.net. 2009100200 28800 7200 604800 86400

that first 86400 after domainname.com. is the TTL for the zone. 86400 seconds is 1 day. 3600 is one hour - but this may increase your domain's DNS traffic on your DNS servers...

after the cut over, you can always change it back to a bigger value.

hope this helps...

Just change it over asap.