Please can anyone tell me how I can change url without losing SERP I have a web site which is currently showing many different pages early in searches. It is an on line retail site in Australia. It cost a fortune in time and money to get it on to page 1 for the key search phrase because the url did bot contain the search phrase. I now own a url which is the same name but has the search phrase added to it so Long term I would be better to change but as I have 4000 + backlinks to this site I am scared to change it. Is there a 100% secure way of directing the old to the new without any loss of value of the backlinks and subsequent loss of SERP ?
I think 301 redirection could be the solution of your problem. So you can use 301 redirection that passes all previous link juice to a new domain.
I'd say with 4000+ backlinks and established SERPs, you're sitting on a gold mine. While permanent redirection (301) is generally considered to be the most appropriate way of achieving what you're thinking, various horror stories associated with this keep hitting various SEO/Webmaster forums regularly, so I would suggest you tread with extreme caution.
301 redirection is a good choice, not 302 redirection. Different from 302 redirection and Meta refresh technique, 301 redirection is regarded as "permanent move" and "safe move", no potential downgrading or punishing risks from search engines. When a search engine sees a 301 redirection, it assumes that all credits for links to the redirecting URL actually belong to the new URL. This helps search engines index the new URLs very quickly.
301 redirect is the best option for you have but you may need to face some downgrade in SERP of your site.. Try to be with your old domain that is precious old domain..
I do agree with other mates. 301 redirection to the new URLs would be best option to maintain your old ranking on Google and also on other search engines. After updating your URL create more and more quality back-links toward your website.
so for the second example you gave which was to change the ugly query string into something nice, is this not internally done then with my links? i can leave them as they currently are and then just enabled the mod_rewrite and it's all done assuming i get no errors?
Almost correct. However, don't leave the internal links as they are. Change those to the new URLs and set 301 redirection via mod_rewrite simultaneously. Assuming your ugly internal links have already been indexed earlier, just changing the internal links to new URLs (without doing the 301) could cause double indexing to happen, thence creating the impression of duplicate content which might earn you a penalty. Even if this (the penalty) does not happen, you'll still be at a disadvantage, because the crawlers will keep (periodically) crawling both sets of URLs - the old as well as the new ones - thereby eating up your bandwidth and possibly, slowing down your server. Both these possibilities would be avoided with a 301 redirect but, like I said earlier on the thread, there have been many horror stories associated with this too, so you should proceed with extreme caution implementing this on an aged site with established backlinks and rankings.
My only concern with the 301 concept is that, while it sounds like you have done things very well to now and had a successful redirection, if you lose the domain name to this other party, they will remove the redirects and the 4000 links to your old domain name will be links to them rather than you. You may want to work quickly to contact as many of the webmasters of those 4000 linking pages, and get them to kindly point them to your new domain.