I have a website that has a pretty high Google ranking. I'd like to
change the domain name of this website. How do I do it without loosing my rank?

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Request for Question Clarification by aceresearcher-ga on 15 Jul 2004 10:06 PDT

Greetings, yasasha!

Unfortunately, no one can *guarantee* you that you can do this and not
lose your Google Rank. I can offer you a number of tips on things to
do to give you the best possible chance of retaining all or most of
your Google rank, but I can't make any guarantees.

If you would be interested in this, please post a Clarification here
stating that, along with your current URL, and I will gladly provide
you with this information.

Regards,

aceresearcher

P.S. If anyone ever tells you that they can guarantee you ANYTHING in
relation to Google Ranking, run -- don't walk -- in the opposite
direction. They are lying.

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Clarification of Question by yasasha-ga on 15 Jul 2004 10:21 PDT

Yes, please. The "tips and things" will be accepted.
My current url is alexspektor.com.

Thanks alot!

We recently overhauled our website and had dozens of pages with high
google ranking. After some extensive research, we determined that the
only appropriate solution was using 301 redirects in our .htaccess
file. Since these are permanent redirects, the spider will update the
new pages and drop the old ones. Our new pages were appearing in
Google within a few days and the transition went smoothly.

In your htaccess file, just ad this line to redirect one page to another:
redirect 301 /oldpage.htm http://newdomain.com/newpage.htm

For more information:

http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm