Here is a common question among new webmasters: if I want to change my domain name, how do I keep my positions in the search engines? You can’t. You have to start from scratch. Just kidding. The fix is fairly simple, though I do warn you - you may lose a little ranking for a while, but it shouldn’t be anything major. What you want to do is set up a permanent (301) domain redirect, such that if someone visited your old domain at oldDomain.com/folder/page.html, they would automatically be forwarded to newDomain.com/folder/page.html. Same idea with the search engines - when the bots crawl your site, they will be redirected by this 301 which tells them that the redirect is permanent and that they should update their databases accordingly. So how do you do this? Easy as eating pie! But maybe not quite as fun…anyways, I digress. It’s just three simple lines of code to put into your .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?old-domain\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.new-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Obviously changing the domain names to their appropriate values. Viola! Done. However, it may take a while for you to see the domain change in search results.
I represent a company that is asking for the most efficient way to accomplish this. Thanks for the tip.
Changing of domain name or redirecting the pages of any website affects keyword rankings in search engines.