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SEO (Google) ranking implications if you rename a domain name of a website

Sometimes it becomes necessary to switch your established website from its old name to a new domain name.
The following is said under the assumption you have the same content and structure on your new site as on the old one. Let's assume for some business reasons you need a new domain name or you need to change the top level portion of the name.
Our sample uses OLDdomain.com and NEWdomain.com.
You register the new name and point it to the same website structure as you did with the original (former) name. Now have those two domain names pointing to the same content.

Since you shouldn't just duplicate content your common sense will tell you to permanently redirect OLDdomaincom to NEWdomain.com.
In IIS you can do this in the IIS Management console and on Unix you can use a .htaccess file. A "permanently moved" response code from the server is "301". Compare: the "temporary moved" server response code is 302.

Once your 301 is in place it will take a few days up to a few weeks and all of your pages show up in Google under their new domain name.

So far, so good, BUT: your rankings in Google are likely to be lost at this time!

At the time this article is written there is no way to rollover your rankings from one domain to the other instantly. (Please write to me if this information is outdated so that I can update this article).
Google looks at your new domain name as a new entity which has no reputation so far. No other websites have backlinks towards your new domain name! They all still point to OLDdomain.com and in most cases you cannot request a change from the other website owners.
In theory it would be a great idea if Google would make a 'note' that the backlinks on other sites actually are now meaant to be a link to NEWdomain.com especially if the site structure is the same. But I guess Google is afraid that OLDdomain.com could potentially then be used for another website that (keeps the structure or not) and fills in their content?.

Conclusion: the 301 (permanently moved) server redirect does lots of harm to your earned Google reputation.

A possible solution can be that you use a 302 (temporarily moved) response code instead and build up your NEWdomain.com reputation from scratch and wait until it is good enough in order to dare to change the 302 to a 301.
Disadvantage of a 302 is that your OLDdomain.com will still be used for a long time in Google's index as part of your page's Url and that is may be not what you wanted in the first place.

Final conclusion: Both approaches are not ideal and best is not to change the domain name at all if not definitely necessary (unless you don't care about your ranking).

Best regards
Cheers, Frank