Will Changing My Website Name Affect My Page Rank?

Will Changing My Website Name Affect My Page Rank?

Will changing my website name affect my page rank?

Changing your domain name will certainly affect your search engine rankings, mostly because each and every search engine responds differently to such changes so great caution should be taken.

All in all, it's important to clarify what exactly could be affected depending on the particulars you change.

The necessity to change your domain name could arise from you having a more suitable domain name to your business line or the changing of the company name.

However, with a new domain name, you will need to come up with new web pages which will be having no links

The most important factor in successful URL redirecting or domain forwarding is making sure that the links to your old website from directories and other websites are made up to date.

A few tips of how you can ensure that users will still find your website after the change include;

• Your old website needs to link to your new web page for search engines to find your site. When changing your domain name, Google Webmaster advise that "Once your new site is live, you may wish to place a permanent redirect (using a '301' code in HTTP headers) on your old site to inform visitors and search engines that your site has moved." Or even go for the "HTML page with a link-solution.

•  Just having a web page displaying the new URL, This will maintain a lot of the web linkage of the old URL, but the old page will by default have a better Google Page Rank than the new page. By informing new and old customers of the new URL, links and bookmarks should change over some time and one should notice less and less traffic on the old URL and more on the new URL.

• Remember, leaving a page on the old URL displaying the new URL but with no <A>-link.  No search engines will let your new site take up the users they previously had on the old site.

• Finally, make sure emails to old addresses are forwarded for the foreseeable future. This can be done easily using aliases in your mail server. It is also reasonably simple to configure them to the automatic bounce back message function for them to Keep delivering the emails even while auto responding .