Is 301 forwarding a old domain to a new domain a good idea?

Is forwarding a old domain that is ranking to a new domain good?

[spiritualseo]

I have a website which is ranking pretty good in the SERPs. But recently a law firm told me that my domain name was infringing copyrights and that I need to change the domain name or take down the site. I have registered a new domain but I don't know which is the best method to maintain rankings:

1.) Should I login to my domain registrar account and forward the old domain to the new domain using a 301 redirect?

2.) Should I login to my web hosting account and add a 301 redirect code in the htaccess file?

Currently I have the homepage ranking for most of the important keywords. Internal pages rank only for a few keywords.

Please let me know what is the right method to do this.

[willybfriendly]

Just because a law firm tells you there is an infringment does not mean that there is. Do you know that there is an infringement? Why is the law firm not trying to take the domain itself if it is an infringement?

If you must 301 to a new domain expect a minimum of 3 months for the new domain to see any benefit at all, and more like 6 months before traffic returns to anything near normal.

Also, in as much as possible, 301 by the page, not the site (i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 -> www.newsite.com/page1). In order to do that you will most likely need to use .htaccess

[spiritualseo]

Thanks for your reply. Is there any major advantage of doing a 301 by page? I mean, I thought of taking the old site off hosting and putting the new site in and then forwarding the old domain to the new domain. This way all internal pages get redirected automatically.

If I do a page by page redirect don't you think I will need to do a redirect for every one of the pages? I have around 1000 pages. Is there a way by which you can redirect all pages using a single patch of code?

[ZydoSEO]

I am assuming you are only wanting to change the domain name - that every page on your old site will exist on the new domain with the exact same URI, the only thing different in the new URL is the domain. If that is indeed the case and you have access to Mod_Rewrite (UNIX environment) or ISAPI Rewrite (MS Windows Server environment) on your web server, you should be able to accomplish this with relative ease.

I am winging this off of the top of my head, but you should be able to use a very simple Mod/ISAPI Rewrite httpd.conf file similar to the following:

# if the page request was for my old domain
# then redirect them to my new domain with the exact same URI and Query String

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} olddomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) [newdomain.com$1...] [R=301,L]

Not knowing the specifics of how your DNS entries and web server is configured, whether your also support HTTPS on your site, etc. it's hard to give a definitive solution. But I would definitely look into using Mod_Rewrite or ISAPI Rewrite if you have access to either. It would be much easier than modifying all 1000 pages individually to perform a 301 redirect.