Changing domain names and the impact on your Google rankings
If you are thinking about changing your business’ domain name to a brand new domain, should you be worried about losing your Google rankings? The bottom line is you are going to lose your rankings for a period of time, because it is a brand new domain and Google will see it as such so you cannot expect your website to be in the same position as it is now immediately.
The advice is to avoid that scenario at all costs, because one of the contributing attributes to a domain’s ranking in Google is the age of your website. That is without mentioning the fact that all the web pages on the internet that are linking to your old domain name will still be linking to it, and it is incredibly difficult to update all those links on other websites.
One solution that has been offered by Google is to place a permanent 301 redirect on your old domain’s web pages that redirects crawlers to the equivalent page on your new domain. This is not an automated task. Essentially you may need to edit each web page on your old domain to redirect visitors to its equivalent page on the new domain. Depending on the technology used to implement your website this can be made easier. If you have created your website on a Linux server you can edit the .htaccess file. If for example you have created your website using asp.net technology then each page needs to be edited manually.