new domain name and file to inherit current ranking from old one

how to keep the current ranking when domain name and page files changed

[mms19]

My friend's site, say www.abc.com, has some Web pages, say www.abc.com/service1.htm, www.abc.com/service2.htm www.abc.com/service3.htm, currently ranking well for some keywords in search engines. As now they are going to change their domain name to say xyz.com and the Web pages of service1.htm to product10.htm, service2.htm to product20.htm, service3.htm to product30.htm. (The old domain name will be used for someone else.) How can he make the new Web pages of www.xyz.com/product10.htm, www.xyz.com/product20.htm, www.xyz.com/product30.htm keep the good ranking as the old pages?

Thank you.

[dougmcc1]

mms19,

Your friend risks losing his positioning in the search engines just by renaming a page on his site. If service1.htm is changed to product10.htm, the search engines will think product10.htm is an entirely new page and will recrawl and reindex the page as if it didn't exist before.

The same applies to a new domain. The search engine spiders will have to recrawl and reindex the whole domain.

But one option is to move the pages to the new domain and apply a 301 redirect to them on the old domain. This would direct the traffic the old pages are recieving to the new pages on the new site. Then either make changes to the pages on the new site, or remove them from the old site so that the pages aren't considered duplicates.

Also, if there is web sites linking to the current web site, they need to be notified of the move. For example, if Best Widget Company is linking to abc.com, they need to be told that abc.com has been moved to xyz.com and that service1.htm has been changed to product10.htm, service2.htm has changed to product20.htm and so on.