I'm changing my URL. How can I maintain my rank?
Regrettably, we cannot manually change your listed address at the same time you move to your new site.That said, there are steps you can take to make sure your transition is a smooth one. Google listings are based in part on our ability to find you from links on other sites. To preserve your rank, you will want to inform others who link to you of your change of address. One way to find out who is linking to you is to try a link search. Enter "link:[your full URL]" into the Google search box. You may not find every page that links to you with this method, but it should help you begin redirecting the links leading to your site. (Please note: we do not serve link queries for all of the sites in our index, so this may not produce any results for your site.) Once your new site is live, you may wish to place a permanent redirect (using a "301" code in HTTP headers) on your old site to inform visitors and search engines that your site has moved.
Finally, if your site goes unlisted for a time, this does not mean you were dropped from our index. Sometimes, in these transitions, we will fail to find a site at its new address. Just be sure that others are linking to you and we should pick you up on our next web crawl.