In 99% of the cases where someone asks us how to change their domain name without losing rankings, our advice is simple...DON'T!

In our experience, most webmasters are far too eager to change their domain names. In fact, unless the new domain is really (and we mean really) outstanding or the old domain is absolutely terrible, the drawbacks to changing a domain name far outweigh the advantages.

First of all, unless you can get a new domain that exactly matches the keywords you most want to rank for, the domain itself is not going to directly play a huge role in your rankings. For example, if you sell custom calendars and you are able to secure customcalendars.com (or even the .org or .net) then you might actually have a case where it's worthwhile to switch over to that new domain name.

However, if instead you acquire calendarscustom.com, that domain will help you rank for the keyword calendars custom (same words, different order), but it's not going to have much direct effect on your ability to rank for your target keyword of custom calendars.

It's still true that, over time, people will tend to link to you using the anchor text calendars custom and that will indirectly help you rank for custom calendars, but the domain itself will play a much smaller role than if you were able to secure the domain that exactly matches the keywords you want to rank for.

If you can acquire a domain which exactly matches your most important keywords, then that can be a huge boost to your rankings. Exact-match domain names are one of the most powerful ranking tools available. However, they also tend to be prohibitively expensive. But if you can afford them, they...