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I am owner of an existing (3 yr. old) domain http://www.22shrutiharmonium.com and my website appears at the top of the search results in case of some search phrases like "22 shruti" , "22 shruti harmonium", "shruti harmonium" etc., in major search engines like google, bing, yahoo etc. My website has also been listed in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonium).

Now, I wish to provide more generalized information on my site and hence I want to change the domain name to www dot 22shruti dot com.

Please guide me, about the ways / steps to retain the search engine credentials of my website OR, if not, then minimize the decrease in ranks, if I change the domain name.

Note : My website has windows web hosting.

HopelessN00b
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Rupak Kharvandikar
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2 Answers2

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You will want to setup the new domain's hosting and point the old domain as an alias domain. From there, in your Apache config or .htaccess access file, you want to use Apache's mod_rewrite to complete a 301 redirect on your old domain and any sub-pages to point to the new domains.

When you do a 301 redirect, most common search engines will transfer the SEO for that page/link/domain to the new domain over time - usually 3-6 months if not sooner.

Here is an example .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?old-domain.com
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://new-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
James
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    +1 Ensure you use a 301 (permanent) redirect rather than a 302 (temporary) redirect. In Google, most of the pagerank for the old domain will pass through to the new domain when redirected in this way. If your page names change as well, be sure to redirect the individual old pages to the new ones as well (with a 301) to ensure visitors with bookmarks and old links on other sites get directed to the appropriate pages. – Justin Scott Jun 21 '10 at 17:08
  • sorry, I forgot to mention, that my website has windows web hosting – Rupak Kharvandikar Jun 21 '10 at 18:03
  • Make sure you keep the old domain working for at least 6+ months (preferably a year or three) with the seamless 301 redirect going. – Chris S Jun 21 '10 at 18:14
  • Windows web hosting, so you mean IIS is the web server instead of Apache? – James Jun 21 '10 at 20:16
  • yes, IIS web server. – Rupak Kharvandikar Jun 22 '10 at 03:11
  • @Rupak, do you have admin access to the IIS configuration? Or just client/customer-level? – James Jun 22 '10 at 04:30
  • Hi @James, I have client/customer level rights – Rupak Kharvandikar Jun 22 '10 at 17:04
  • See also this page, straight from the big guy in search. Many of Jame's points are spot on. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83105 – Jason Jun 23 '10 at 02:17
  • Rupak, if you can upload an ASP.NET page, you could try making a host specific to that old domain, and place this code as the index page: – James Jun 25 '10 at 18:49
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Keep the old domain for a while (however long you want, maybe until it expires from the registrar?) and use a HTTP 301 Redirect to send users to the new domain.

Search engines usually behave sanely with 301 redirects & will aggregate the old & new domain info...

voretaq7
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