Preserving Your Rankings During a Domain Name Change

I've had a couple of opportunities lately to advise clients on how to preserve their Search Engine (SE) rankings and traffic while we have launched new websites using a different domain name.  This advice also holds true if you have restructured your website on the same domain name.

There are a couple of big hurdles to overcome when you decide to use a new domain name for your website. First is to gracefully redirect your existing SE traffic to the new website and secondly helping your visitors get around the new website.

Use a 301 Redirect to Your New Website

In the world of Apache web servers, the .htaccess file resides in the root directory and can contain a multitude of commands that control how your website is presented to the visitor.  This file is a basic text file and can be created in any editor and uploaded to the server.  Here is the command to be placed in the old domain name's .htaccess file to redirect people from your old web address to the new web address:

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.newdomain.com/newpage.html

You would repeat this for every web page that you need to redirect.  You can easily test your handy work by entering the old web page address into your browser and, if successful, you should be redirected to the new web page.

Helping Your Visitors in the New Website

No matter how thorough you are with your redesign, people may still have difficulty finding their way around your new website.  You should implement a site map to help the human and SE visitors find your new content.  I have already wrote about site maps in this post.

Finally, don't forget to inform your linking partners that you have a new web address.