If you move your Web site to a new domain name, your site may lose some of its search engine ranking. If you simply abandon the old domain name, the Web site will be deactivated and search engines will no longer include it. Your new site will start from scratch in building its search engine ranking.
If your Web site is for personal use, this may not be a concern: you'll probably be able to tell friends and family that the site has moved. However, if you have a business site or public site, you should take care to ensure that it can still be found. In particular, you should keep ownership of your old domain name and use it to "redirect" visitors (including search engines) to your new site. We don't charge any extra fees for the redirection service — just the registration fee for a domain name only account.
There are two common types of redirect: 301 and 302. A 302 redirect is "temporary", and is used when we create a domain name redirect for your domain. When a search engine sees a link that includes your redirected domain name, it will usually index it under the original link, instead of the domain that it actually redirects to.
A 301 redirect is "permanent". It tells search engine spiders and Web browsers that your site has permanently moved, and that they should forget about the old domain name. This causes many Web browsers to update their bookmarks to include the new domain name. It also causes many search engines to forget about the old name and transfer the old page's "ranking" to the new page.
Both Google and Yahoo recommend using a 301 "permanent" redirect when you move your site and you want to preserve your search engine ranking.
There are several ways to create a 301 redirect. Here's one you can do yourself:
RewriteEngine on RewriteRule (.*) http://www.new_domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
(If you need help doing this, let us know and we'll be glad to assist.)
You should probably keep the domain name alias for a while. You can check your Web site statistics to see if people are still accessing your site using the old domain name. If there is no traffic and there are no links on the Web that use your old domain name, it may be safe to cancel the alias and abandon it. There are a number of Web sites you can use to check who links to you. Here is one useful site:
Once you have setup your redirect folder, and checked that the new site is working you can cancel the Web hosting for your old site. During this process make sure you choose to keep the domain name and set it as an alias to new folder you created (choose the alias option, not the redirect — the .htaccess file does the actual redirecting).
The following article provides useful background information on redirects and moving your Web site to a new domain name:
http://www.marketposition.com/blog/archives/2005/12/_unraveling_the.html