We have a client that is planning on rebranding their company and is in the process of changing their company name and domain name. Currently they have a PR 4 and they are concerned once they change the domain they will lose that ranking. Any suggestions on how best to mitigate any SEO problems that occur with the changes in domain names?

Keep the current domain up for a month with the announcement that the company name is changing (you might have already done this). Then redirect the old domain name to the new site. You will not save the PR but if you have the same content it will eventually update.

__________________
Per Click Forums l Member Contests! Internet Marketing Forum

There are services you can buy that will automatically redirect the traffic from one domain to another. If you google domain redirect you will find some of these companies. We have never used them but it appears like they may solve your problem.

I am not a technical person but I am told you can program a redirect using 404 and there is a 3 something redirect which I can recall but here is an article on the scriptygoddess » 404 redirects 404 redirect:

Is there any reason why you could not keep both sites up and running until the other site gets its PR ranking? Thats what I would do then you do not have to risk the search engine rankings.

They could keep the other site up and running but I was concerned that they may get penalized by the search engines for having two sites with duplicate content and it worth not be worth the time to develop all new content for the new site.

Good point bad suggestion on my part