Anyone ever change their domain name?

How do you do it?

[Eljaybe]

Hello!
I am in the process of buying a new domain name for our web site. We want to lose the old name and change it to the new domain name. However, the old name is already indexed by many search engines and directories, plus we just completed paid submissions a month ago to Inktomi, FAST & AskJeeves.
The old domain name has been around for about 5 years now. We redesigned the web site a couple months ago. The new domain (we want to buy) contains our company name and we think it will work better for us.
Has anyone ever gone through this before? How do you get indexed with the new domain name without being accused of spamming? Any advice you can give is greatly appreciated!

[mack]

At one point I was operating 2 sites one on a .com and the other on a .co.uk domain. I decided to drop the .co.uk version and assign all effort to the .com domain.

In general the transaction was smouth. I moved all content to the server hosting the .com version and used htaccess on the other server to instruct bots that content had moved. The spiders followed the rules and indexed the content in it's new location. I retained the old domain and simply posted a page saying "all content now resides on out main site" and a link to the .com site. After a few months I removed the htaccess file and still get a few referals from people folowing old links. In general the change was fairly smouth. I would say the best time to try this would be right after a main update. the reason for this is because the deep crawl generaly follows shortly ater a main update. This will ensure that your content will all indexed by the following index.

[Lisa]

We were using a two word .com, This domain was well placed. It had a PR7 and tons of traffic. So on this domain we just setup a 302 redirect on all important documents. All the spiders, PR, and traffic followed perfectly. It was not a big deal at all. Very smooth! Only thing that didn't follow was the DMOZ listings. But they got changes within the month, we just sent a note saying site had changed. They removed the old listing and placed our new URL in their.

[Eljaybe]

Thank you all for your advice!

One more question. What happens to your old listings on the search engines once you submit the new listings (with new domain name)?
Won't the search engines see two pages that are exactly alike but using different domain names, then decide to ban you from their site? Or, do they see you have posted on the old site "this site has moved to "widgetworld.com", etc.?

[Filipe]

Yes, either set up a page telling people where the new page can be found (good for branding) or just set up a 301 PERMANENT REDIRECT on the old domain name. Either of these methods should prevent you from being penalized with SEs.

[Eljaybe]

Thanks Filipe, I'll try one of those options.