Change domain name without loosing SEO rankings at Google, I changed codingsips.alampk.com to www.codingsips.com, Here in this article I will explain how can we change domain name and update google about our domain name change so that we do not loose our indexes at google it is easy and need less and easy requirements.

How to change domain name without loosing SEO

At the time of migration you must have both of the domains up and running, make sure both of the domains are pointed to different copies of file, This method will not work if your both domain are pointed to same copy of hosted source code. Because during migration process google will verify both of the domains with different requirements which I think will not be possible with single copy.

Requirements

1. 301 redirect confirmation at old domain
2. Google webmaster verification html file at old domain is present and accessable
3. Google webmaster verification html file at new domain is present and accessable
4. Make sure all links at new website are also changed and no link in pointed to old domain

What is 301 Redirect

It means that when some one visits any page of old-domain it will automatically redirect to new-domain
we can do it by putting few lines code in .htaccess file, which will redirect all links of old-domain to new-domain.
But in this code must have to allow only one file that is Google webmaster verification html file mentioned at point 2 in above requirements.
Now if we allowing only one file then we can put only 2 files at old server that are 1- Google webmaster verification html file and 2- .htaccess file all other files are not required but you can keep them as backup.

Put the following code in .htaccess file at old-domain

make the following 3 changes in above code

1. change old-site.com to your old-domain-name like codingsips.alampk.com
2. change new-site.com to your new-domain-name like www.codingsips.com
3. change google123456789abcdefg.html to filename google webmaster tools provided you for verification of old-domain

Save this file. After saving you will only be able to access google verification file at old domain, all other urls will be redirected to new-domain. thus our visitors who clicks our old-domain links in google search or any other place will be automatically and seamlessly redirected to our new-domain. keep old-domain up and running with 301 redirect until google updates our site index to new-domain and keep crawling our new-domain.
When you are confirm that google is all done after that you can put old-domain down, but we will recommend to keep it up as there make be some external links at other search engines or somewhere else, if they hit and our old-domain is down then we can loose these visitors.

Steps at Google webmaster tools

1. Before making Domain change request you must have both sites added to google webmaster tools.
2. Go to old site at webmaster tools and click gear icon and click Change of Address
3. You will be provided a 4 step verification page (as below image) to submit request for Domain Change

I am not sure about how long google webmaster tools take to complete the process of changing domain name, but this is all for how to change domain name without loosing SEO.