Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have a site that has an Alexa rank for 5000 and it receives A LOT of traffic daily. The problem is that my partner and I want to rebrand the name, and move all of our content to a new one. Our current domain has a lot of backlinks, and many big sites including Washington Post have linked to us. How do we go about changing to a new domain, but still keeping our rankings?
Step by step guides would be appreciated, and we would also like to know what the downsides would be. Currently our pages are getting indexed in around 1 minute from Google, and I'm wondering if moving to a new domain will take longer for Google to index and be a real loss for our business.
We've got a reference thread called Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page. In there is a discussion about this topic, and it includes a link to Google's Best Practices for moving a site [webmasterworld.com]. It's got a good step-by-step that is still valid today, as far as I can see.
