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Is it possible to change your domain name, but keep your site's ranking?

by newBum76
9 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I've heard rumors that it's possible to transfer a high ranking site to a new domain name while keeping all your content, rankings, backlinks, and everything else the same. Anybody know anything about this?
#change #domain #ranking #site
  • Profile picture of the author freshmusic
    I dont think so. But if someone know I will be glad to change opinion
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    • Profile picture of the author Dan C. Rinnert
      Yes. Use 301 redirects to redirect all the old URLs at the prior domain the the new URLs on the new domain.
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      • Profile picture of the author entry
        Originally Posted by Dan C. Rinnert View Post

        Yes. Use 301 redirects to redirect all the old URLs at the prior domain the the new URLs on the new domain.
        Will that that keep the Search Engine rankings of the old domain?
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  • Profile picture of the author Christian Little
    Yes you can.

    Google actually gives you a good walkthrough of how to do it - login to Google Webmaster tools for your site. Click on Site Configuration -> Change of Address. They have a guide there on the steps you need to take, but in a nutshell:

    You do it by moving everything from your old domain to your new domain and make sure it all works.

    Then go back to your old domain and setup 301 permanent redirects to point to your new domain.

    Google will take some time (a few weeks usually), but will eventually come around and move all your ranking power to the new domain. This will mean you'll see a drop in rankings for the first while though, but you'll recover pretty fast.

    Google also has a much more detailed guide of how to do it here: https://www.google.com/support/webma...er=83105&hl=en
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  • Profile picture of the author DireStraits
    Yep.

    I did this recently, after discovering I still had a site for which I was using a (possibly) trademarked domain.

    I hadn't received any complaints about it, but I didn't want to take it offline and lose all the work I'd put into it, so I decided to swap out the domain for a new one.

    I 301 redirected the old domain to the new one, and submitted a "change of address" request through Google Webmaster Tools. Over a period of a week or two, URLs at the old domain dropped out of their index, as they were replaced with new ones, and now the old domain doesn't show up in the index at all.

    For the most part, I retained my search-engine rankings, too (even though the new domain was no longer an "exact-match" keyword domain). Although they did drop at first, over a couple of weeks or so they climbed back to up more or less exactly where they were. I assume it just took a little time for Google to finish crawling the pages on which my backlinks resided, and to channel the link-juice to the new URLs.
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    • Profile picture of the author newBum76
      Thanks for the advice everyone, it's much appreciated! I was kinda nervous but this makes me feel a whole lot better about a site of mine that I'm worried about.

      Originally Posted by DireStraits View Post

      Yep.

      I did this recently, after discovering I still had a site for which I was using a (possibly) trademarked domain.

      I hadn't received any complaints about it, but I didn't want to take it offline and lose all the work I'd put into it, so I decided to swap out the domain for a new one.
      .
      That's exactly why I need a new domain name, it has a trademark in it and ranking at the top for a couple keyword phrases with the trademark. Lesson learned!
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  • Profile picture of the author hobsdv
    Like the above posters have said, you can do it with 301 redirects
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  • Profile picture of the author JoshuaZamora
    Yup just redirect! If you don't know what that means basically just set the new domain to forward to your current domain when someone clicks on it or types it into the web browser. Fairly easy to do
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