Let \({\mathscr {B}}(H)\) be the algebra of all bounded linear operators on a complex Hilbert space H, and \({{\mathscr {C}}}{{\mathscr {R}}}(H)\) be the set of all operators in \({\mathscr {B}}(H)\) with closed range. For any operator \(A\in {\mathscr {B}}(H)\) , let \(A^*\) and \(A^{\dag }\) be the adjoint and Moore–Penrose inverse of A, respectively. Fix a positive scalar \(\alpha \) , and let \(\Theta _\alpha \) be the transformation defined on \({{\mathscr {C}}}{{\mathscr {R}}}(H)\) by \(\begin{aligned} \Theta _\alpha (A):= \frac{1}{\alpha +1}\left( \alpha A + A^{*\dag }\right) ,~(A\in {{\mathscr {C}}}{{\mathscr {R}}}(H)). \end{aligned}\) In this paper, we characterize all maps \(\Phi \) on \({\mathscr {B}}(H)\) preserving the closedness of the ranges of the difference of operators and for which \(\Theta _\alpha (\Phi (A)-\Phi (B))\) and \(\Theta _\alpha \left( A-B\right) \) are equivalent by unitaries for all \(A,~B\in {\mathscr {B}}(H)\) . Then we use such a characterization to obtain the form of all bijective linear maps \(\Phi \) on \({\mathscr {B}}(H)\) for which \(\Theta _\alpha \left( \Phi (A)\right) \) and \(\Theta _\alpha \left( \Phi (B)\right) \) are equivalent by unitaries whenever so are \(A,~B\in {\mathscr {B}}(H)\) . Moreover, we obtain similar results when the relation equivalence by unitaries is replaced by unitarily similarity. Furthermore, a number of related results and consequences is obtained.