Retain/transfer old website's page rank?

[Xava]

Hi,

I am working on this non-profit org website. Their current domain name is registered in the name of the guy who is no longer associated with the organization. The domain name is going to expire in couple of months. We have registered for a new domain name. It will be up in couple of weeks as soon as I am done working on the website.

My question is, the current website is #1 on google for a couple of search terms. What can I do to retain the high page rank after we switch over to the new domain name/new server?

Thanks.

[Menard]

Is the guy whose name in which it is registered going to keep the domain or just let it expire? If it expires, just register it when it expires, provided the registrar has not pulled something funny, or have him transfer the domain to your name (I think you can do that). Even if the domain has expired and the site is down for months (as far as the search engines are concerned), all of the links to it are still going to be out there and it would not take much to get the pagerank back up, if it fell at all.

Since the pagerank is largely based on backlinks to the domain, and the strength of those links, you cannot (at least I don't see any way) transfer that pagerank because all of those links point to the old domain and the only way to keep the pagerank is to hunt down and change every one of those links to point to the new domain; that could be quite a task and you would still lose on pagerank, at least for a while, due to the links now being new again, not to mention losing any oneway links that picked up on the site through crawls or visits by webmasters during it existence.

[Manu]

Keep the old domain and just do a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one.