Least painful way to move site to a new domain?

[Fastlane]

I have a website that I want to move to a new domain. The site has 20 some pages and works on WordPress. The site is currently on a .net domain and I simply want to move the entire site to the .com.

What is the easiest way to do this? It does get some traffic and ranks for some keywords, and I'd hate to mess up rankings.

In terms of links, is it best to get the webmasters i have exchange links with to change it to the .com, or is it sufficient to just redirect the .net to the .com?

Thanks

[pokeraussie]

In .htaccess you would setup a 301 redirect to redirect everything from .net to .com By doing that theoretically the link juice will be passed to the new URL and you would keep the rankings.

The .htaccess file would look something like this (I think)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} \.net$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

[parttimepoker]

Why do you want to move it? Just curious, seems like if it's not broke, no need to fix it.

Pokeraussie already covered the redirect; as for moving the site itself, moving a WP site is pretty easy. Here's the step-by-step:

Moving WordPress « WordPress Codex

[Fastlane]

Thanks for the tips guys! Something came up, so will look into this tomorrow.

Why do you want to move it? Just curious, seems like if it's not broke, no need to fix it.

You could be right. The site ranks for it's KID, but the volume is low. I haven't put a whole lot of effort into the site, and got the .com so I figured I would transfer the site to the .com and continue to build the website and expand beyond its KID and try to rank for higher volume terms in this niche. I guess I feel that the .com will give it more "authority".And if it's no biggie to move it I guess why not.

[GregW]

When you're doing the redirect, the easiest method would be to redirect the actual domain itself in the backend of wherever the .net domain is hosted. Just look for the "url forwarding" or "url redirect" links or something like that. Then redirect it to the .com.

You could achieve the same thing using htaccess or PHP if you prefer, but you'd be using unnecessary hosting space. Plus it's just easier the domain redirect way.

[Fastlane]

Cool, thanks. If that achieves the same thing, then I'll just try that.

When you're doing the redirect, the easiest method would be to redirect the actual domain itself in the backend of wherever the .net domain is hosted. Just look for the "url forwarding" or "url redirect" links or something like that. Then redirect it to the .com.

You could achieve the same thing using htaccess or PHP if you prefer, but you'd be using unnecessary hosting space. Plus it's just easier the domain redirect way.

[pokeraussie]

Is URL forwarding at the domain registrar level always search engine friendly?

[Fastlane]

Curious about that too. Contacted support to hear what they recommend, but I'm afraid that they have little knowledge about that. The domain is registered and hosted with Godaddy (Their hosting sucks, I know)

Is URL forwarding at the domain registrar level always search engine friendly?

[pokeraussie]

I think with Godaddy you can setup a 301 redirect, however, something else to think about if you're forwarding a URL from within your domain account is that all the URL's will redirect to the .com home page. This is not the ideal situation for SEO, ideally you want the same pages on the .net to redirect to the identical page on the .com to transfer the link juice. Honestly I think you should be doing the redirects in .htaccess it's not difficult to setup at all.

[Fastlane]

Yeah, I absolutely want the pages on the .net to redirect to the identical page on the .com. I Guess I'll await response from support to see if they have a solution. Otherwise I will go ahead and do what you suggested earlier. Thanks for the input.