Changing Domain Names? Don’t Lose Your Rankings.
September 15th, 2007Here 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.
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By ccricers on Sep 18, 2007 | Reply
Any idea on how to do this with an IIS server?
By Nick on Sep 18, 2007 | Reply
ccricers,
This is what I found for a 301 redirect on an IIS server:
1. Open Internet Services Manager and right-click on the file or folder you wish to redirect.
2. Select the radio button “a redirection to a URL”.
3. Enter the desitnation page for the redirect.
4. Check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”.
5. Hit “Apply”.