Industry guru Dave Taylor answers free tech support questions about a wide variety of business and technical topics, including blogging, Google AdSense, MySpace, Sony PSP, Apple iPod, Mp3 players, management, Linux, SEO, Mac OS X, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Microsoft Windows.

Still befuddled? Get immediate live tech support with SupportSpace!

What is the effect of a domain name change on Google page rank?

We are considering changing our company name but do not want to lose our natural search ranking in Google. Is there is sytem by which we can transfer rank or a step by step process that we can go through so as to make for the smoothest domain name change without losing eveything the existing site has acheived?

Dave's Answer:

The answer depends on whether you want to talk about short term or long term. In the short term, there's no question that changing your domain name will adversely affect your PageRank at Google. Even if you just look at the most simplistic view of the Google algorithm you know that your rank for a given search is essentially a popularity vote by others linking to your site. Change your domain name, and all those links vanish.

Fortunately, there are some things you can do to mitigate this effect, not the least of which is to ensure that you have a proper 301 redirect on your old domain so that the search engines can immediately see that you've changed, not that you're duplicating content or trying to pull a fast one.

Secondly, you can do some research on Google to ascertain which sites point to you and email them asking for their links to be updated to the new domain name. You can ascertain this by searching with the link: operator. For example, if I wanted to see who linked to AskDaveTaylor.com, I'd use this: link:www.askdavetaylor.com. There's a splendid reference on these operators at Google too, one well worth reading: Google Advanced Search Operators.

Finally, if you have quality content on your site and are following best practices for adding new material with some regularity, you can rest assured that in the long run your new site will pop right into the search engine and continue its climb up the rankings to help your customers find you.

Oh, and I bet you'd find my book Growing Your Business with Google excellent reading too. It'll unquestionably help you learn even more ways to improve your search ranking, among many other things.

Help others find this article at Del.icio.us, Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and Simpy.

Categorized: Search Engine Optimization (Article 6646)
Tagged: domain names, google pagerank, seo, web sites
Previous: How do I get started with my new Sony PSP?
Next: How do I get traffic to my site without SEO?

Subscribe!

Never miss another useful Q&A article again! Subscribe to AskDaveTaylor with Google Reader.

Comments

Hello Dave, I have a question about this article. Last year I switched from an html site to a database driven website (x-cart). Although I lost PageRank for a few weeks after the switch, I was soon back at the PageRank of 4 my site had for many years. A couple weeks ago - just doing routine monitoring of links and pages indexed at Google - I saw that my PageRank had decreased to 3, and that Google was now recording my site as TWO sites - one at www.soapshed.com and the other soapshed.com. The www site had zero links, whereas the soapshed.com site had 52. The number of pages indexed varies too, one site has 656 pages, the other 540. In trying to figure out what was going on, I also discovered that my site designers had put a permanent 301 redirect on my domain name, www.soapshed.com, which now redirects visitors (and search engines) to an internal page where apparently the x-cart product catalog is: http://www.soapshed.com/store/home.php From what I've been reading, all the links I have created for www.soapshed.com over the years no longer 'count' because of this permanent redirect. Is this the case? How is my situation the same or different from using a 301 Redirect to a whole new domain name, as compared to a specific folder/page within the same old domain name? TIA

Posted by: Karen at August 13, 2006 2:37 PM

Just out of curiosity, having a 301 redirect to Google from www.website.com, and then letting Google update PR would give a (false) pagerank of 10? --- So now that Google is looking down on that, will it look down on any page redirect from a lower PR to a higher PR?

Posted by: KC at September 6, 2006 8:54 PM

About one month ago I changed the domain name on a site that was six years old. It was a necessary change as the site name was DVD specific and I need it to reflect a broader subject area. One month in and the results are devastating in terms of seo. I hope things will improve but I would advise caution when considering making this change.

You can read my experience of this here: http://www.stevekinsey.com/archives/2007/02/19/06/03/19/

Posted by: Stephen Kinsey at February 19, 2007 6:43 AM

Hello,
I needed to make some company internal changes. For this reason I moved my old website domain www.pixel-storefront.com to a new domain www.pixel-templates.com. My domain www.pixel-storefront.com has a Pagerank = 4. I have made the domain transfer 8 weeks ago. After 2 months, my Pagerank for www.pixel-templates.com is still = 0.
I have made all the necessary 301 redirects and all other Google suggested do's and dont's.
How long will it take, until the pagerank = 4 will be transfered to my new domain www.pixel-templates.com? Has anyone out there made similar experiences? Do I get punished now by Google simply because of the fact that I needed to re-structure my company and website projects?
graphically & sincerely,
Marc Klein
mediaVinci - The art of invention

Posted by: mediaVinci at August 6, 2007 10:15 AM

Hello Stephen Kinsey,

http://www.stevekinsey.com/archives/2007/02/19/06/03/19/

Your article precisely described the huge impact and the involved negative effects on your business by switching to a new domain name. I get an error 404 page not found when I try to access the page as mentioned above.

Please, send me your updated link. Thank you.

graphically & sincerely,

Marc Klein
mediaVinci - The art of invention

Posted by: Marc Klein at September 28, 2007 2:49 AM

hey i wanted to change my websites domain name from www.mysharingworld.com to a new name but i do not wanna loose the page rank ....

if i put up a 404 redirect will the page rank transfer???

Posted by: Agam at February 8, 2008 12:06 AM

Hello Dave,,I have a question...What are the DO's and The DOnt's of a Cellphone torubleshooting?

Posted by: Mariane at February 19, 2008 5:16 PM

is there any problem with pagerank status when moving our domain registrar?

Posted by: Fery at February 24, 2008 8:30 PM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!