For whatever reason you may one day want to change your domain name. Of course the biggest issue with this is you are going to loose all your search engine ranking! Thankfully that is no longer the case. Google’s Webmaster Tools now gives you a helping hand in this feat. However in this part of the lesson I want to go over how to redirect your old site to the new site. This is because many sites link to your current site. If you move sites you are going to want all those links to still work.
Google recommends you have a permantent 301 redirect for every page in your site. Fortunately this is an easy process. On my client’s server they are using Windows 2003 server and IIS. They are also using ISAPI Rewrite software by Helicon.
In the old domain
RewriteBase / RewriteRule (.*) http://www.new-domain.com/$1 [R=301,NC]
This was put in the ISAPI config for their old domain (old-domain.com). What this says is ‘Any page that is being accessed, find it on our new domain and its a 301 redirect. So if I try to go to http://www.old-domain.com/contact it will permanetly redirect the viewer to http://www.new-domain.com/contact
