Hello all.

I have a client who has a blog with 8 years of entries. She has recently decided to do a branding change.

Can someone help offer ways to accomplish changing her domain name while keeping the links in tact?

This is what she has... domainbrand1DOTcom. Has been blogging on it for 8 years.

This is what she wants... domainbrand2DOTcom. But keeping the same blog and content.

I'm concerned about keeping all the external links in working order but using the new domain name. Also want to be able to keep page ranking. (Not sure if that can be done because of domain name change).

How would you go about doing this?

301 redirect the old name to the new

Do the 301 like Chris says. After 8 years, isn't her branding already established? Why the change? It would be like starting over.

301 Redirect, and then let Google know about it through the "change of address" link under Site configuration on the Google Webmaster Tools.

Yup 301 direct.

Hey thanks for the replies.
I'll look at the 301 redirect option.

I agree, 8 years, she has done great branding, but she wants to do the new name. The site is currently her real name, but she wants to move it more into a "product" name. :-)

Thanks again.

301 redirect to new domain name.

301 redirect your main domain to the new main domain
do the same if you have sub-domains as well.

if you want to only redirect a certain page, use this code in your HTML:

     header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); 
    header("Location: http://www.thenewwebsite.com");

if you want to move the entire website, place this code in your .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.thenewwebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

if you run Ruby on Rails, you can also do this:

def old_action
headers["Status"] = "301 Moved Permanently"
redirect_to "http://www.thenewwebsite.com/"
end