If I’m new, with a brand new site I am almost certainly listed with a reputation of zero by the search engines.

Over a period of months and years my sites reputation might increase, depending on how ‘valuable’ as ‘information currency’ my ‘content’ actually is. The result of that increase would be a higher return in search term results on search engine pages.

I have some questions:

When I move a website to a new hosting server with a new IP address will the search engines note the move and think that the site might have changed hands? Will my reputation within search results be affected?

What about a domain name? What impact will that have on my ranking if I change the domain name along with the name of the site? Content would still be the same, so will the ranking stay the same? Will my search result credibility transfer too? How would I tell the search engines I’ve moved the site somewhere else?

Will the search engines follow the search redirect and understand what has happened? Will I have to start all over again?

If I buy a web domain of somebody else and create a new website on that domain will I retain the old sites search reputation?

When I buy a domain most companies will offer me 1, 2, 5 or 10 years at the point of purchase for the said domain name. If I buy 10 years, I usually get a dramatic reduction in cost in comparison of actually renewing the name every year at the annual charge.

So if I buy a domain name for ten years surely I’m committing to my content being around for a long time? Therefore would the search engines consider that commitment in their page ranking for my pages?

The word on the street is that long term commitment to domains is taken into consideration when working out where a website should be listed in a search result for keywords, so maybe we should buy domains for the maximum period they are available?

What do you think?