I have seen many users asking how to transfer an old domain to a new domain name without losing ranking, here are the short steps you need to do to transfer your website to the new domain name and to pass the link juice, ranking and page rank to the new domain. 1. Transfer data from the old domain name to the new one and rebrand it to the the new one. Make sure the transferred website is fully functional. 2. Redirect your old domain name to the new domain name using SEO friendly permanent redirect 301. You can do this by adding the following code to your .htaccess file on the root of your old domain: Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301] Code (markup): This code will redirect your pages of the old domain name to the equivalent pages of the new domain name. * Test the redirect and make sure it is fully functional. 3. Use change of address tool at Google webmaster to notify about the new change. * Now you need to wait and be patient until Google pass the link juice, ranking and page rank to the new domain. * It is recommended to keep the old domain renewed and redirect.
During previous change to our website structure, We used 301 htaccess to pass on the Juice to our new web pages. 301 redirect works like a charm. Just make sure that you don't have too many redirects in between, Say for example a.html redirects to b.html and b to c.html which is bad signal for search engines, Since such redirects looks suspicious.
I agree with you on this, too many redirects will trigger the search engine bot and will lead to penalization or in worst cases to website ban.