Changed the domain of my site - how to keep ranking

Hi,

I have my site hosted with a domain name for a while, then I changed the site name. My old domain name has google ranking of 3/10.

For now, I have just set it to forward all requests to my new site, is this good? Is there better way to get the google ranking forwarded or at least some help for ranking of new site.

Thanks in advance.

 

You should use 301 redirect of all pages on the site.
This will make SE index the pages at new domain.

Put the following in .htaccess file at your old domain.

RewriteEngine ON
Redirect 301 /old-page.shtml http://www.newdomain/new-page.shtml

Code (markup):

You'd need to do this to all pages or use mod_rewrite if all your pages still have the same name.
This should work for the later.

RewriteEngine ON
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Code (markup):

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and then I should stop the forward. Right?

 

Could you help me set this up. On my old server, my domain name was mapped liike

./root/dir1/

on my new server all files are on root

so ./root/dir/index.html maps to ./index.html

how to do this. My file names are same, but the folder hierarchy has changed.

Is there any other way to do this.

Thanks
Dshah

 

I don't know what exactly is forward but you should simple use the second option from SpeedyDomainRegistration and option one if you change the URL - nothing else.

 

Try option two and see if that works, otherwise post back here on the thread and we will see.

 

okay, the option two seems to be working, www.olddomain.com/abc.html now goes to www.newdomain.com/abc.html

I have few more questions:

1. What happens to pages which were on old domain, but not present now? Will it go to new homepage?

2. This will be effective next visit of crawlers? Will it possibly bring the same ranking to new domain?


My new .htaccess file looks like this. Is this okay

# -FrontPage-

IndexIgnore .htaccess */.??* *~ *# */HEADER* */README* */_vti*

RewriteEngine ON
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Code (markup):

Many Thanks!

 

It should also be redirected to the new domain. Since the page does not exist, it will get 404 and SE will eventually delist that page.

Yes, the next time crawler will try the page at your new domain.
Yes, ranking should pass to the new domain when you use 301 redirect.

Remember, you should not take down the redirect until the all or at least most pages on the new domain are indexed.


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I actually never take down my 301's. You always have some backlinks somewhere to the old version, the best is to keep it forever.

 

You should not have to do anyting to change that since translated path won't be effected.


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I agree. You should keep that forever or contact owner of pages with backlinks to update the links.


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Now I feel, I should have done this long long before. This transition happened around 4 months ago and what I did was just set domain forward