Website change of address

[AgentMonkey]

Hi Everyone,

I apologize if the answer to this questions is obvious, but I wanted some input on how changing our web address of our site will affect our SERP.

We are looking to change our website address from a.com to b.com due to rebranding of our company (primarly to expand our product line as our current url and company name are restricting). I understand that this can be done using 301 direct  and via webmaster tools with google.

My question is how does this work exactly? Will our old website address show in SERP rankings, and when a user clicks on the listing are they redirected to our new address?

With regards to building new links from press releases etc, do we have links point to our new web address or the old one in order to increase SERP? Does google see our old address and new address as the same website and therefor it does not matter where inbound links point to and both will increase our ranking positions?

It took 6 years of in house seo  to get our website to rank on the first page of all the major search engines for our keywords, so we am being very cautious before we do anything.

Thanks everyone for your input, it is greatly appreciated

[Host1]

As long as you use a 301-redirect and report the change to google via google webmasters tools you will be fine. The rankings should transfer fine to the new domain.

As long as the old domain stays active and redirects the incoming links to the new domain using a 301-redirect it shouldn't matter whether they point to the old or the new domain.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Hi,

There was just a great post on Google Webmaster Central about this very topic - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-to-move-your-content-to-new.html

Register both domains with webmaster tools, make sure the new domain is crawlable by googlebot, 301 redirect the old pages/site to the new pages/site, and in webmaster tools of the old domain, use the change of address option under site configuration to tell Google that your site has changed domains and is now on the new domain.

Make sure to check out Google's post, as they give some good tips and walk you through the process.

Good luck!