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.

So, question: are reciprocal link exchanges good for SEO?

Answer: No. Reciprocal link exchanges (RLE) have no positive affect on SEO anymore. A while ago in the past you might have had some success in doing RLE, and you will often still see new webmasters posting in forums for link exchanges. However, it is a good idea to stay away from these. First of all, you want your incoming and outgoing links to be relevant to your website’s topic. Nine times out of ten, reciprocal links are not. Now, however, if you are interested in performing a RLE with a topic-related website, that can’t hurt. Google won’t reward you with PR or better search rankings from off-topic links, and, without diving into the design theory behind page rank, having too many outbound unrelated links will just hurt the PR that you have.

But most importantly, remember this: Linking to unrelated sites is of no use to your user and just serves as another potential exit point from your site.