Changing domain name - what are the practical steps involved
- by Homunculus Reticulli
I launched a website a couple of years ago, bright eyed and bushy tailed, with dreams of conquering the world. Unfortunately it wasn't to be. Now, that I am a bit older and wiser, I have spent some money on branding and creating more quality content etc, I am rebranding and relaunching the site with a new domain name.
Although the traffic on the old site is laughable (i.e. non-existent), there are a few pages of good information on there and I don't want to lose any "juice" those pages may have gained because web crawlers have been seeing it for a few years now.
Ok, the upshot of all that is this: I want to change my domain name from xyz.com to abc.com. I am maintaining the same friendly urls I had before, only the domanin name part of the url will change, so that any traffic coming to the old page will be forwarded/redirected? to the new page seamlessly.
How do I go about achieving this (i.e. what are the steps I need to carry out, and to minimize any "disruption" to any credibility the existing site has with Googlebot etc?
I am running Apache 2.x on a headless Linux (Ubuntu) server.
