Someone asked me if this was a good idea. Basically what he is saying is that he wants to abandon his company’s domain name for one that contains the main keyword that he is trying to rank for in Google.
There is no doubt that having the keywords you’re going after in your domain gives you an advantage over your competition. I’m a prime example of this. I wanted to rank in Google for the key phrase “SEO Guelph” so I registered the domain seoguelph.com but my situation was a little different. I didn’t have an established domain at the time; I didn’t have 8 years’ worth of backlink history and brand recognition. These are all things you have to look at when changing domains for your business.
I usually recommend against this unless you are starting out from scratch. If this was 5 years ago then I would say yes, in this day and age Google is giving just as much preference to generic non keyword stuffed domains as it is towards ones that do contain keywords in it. Interchanging a domain that you have had for many years for a brand new one is silly. We do know for a fact that new domains can be treated with an ounce of caution in the eyes of Google, at least after it passes the first year mark in which 95% of spam domains don’t get renewed.
I don’t recommend it, but if there is no turning back then I highly recommend redirecting your old domain to your new one via a 301 redirect, that way all the link juice and pagerank will be passed onto your new site.
Hope that helps clarify a few things.