Hello everyone, could you please help me with finding the best way to perform 301 redirect since the site I'm working on is to be moved to another domain? If the page names as well as their organization remain the same is it enough just to redirect the domain like www.the.com to www.a.com without redirecting each page to another page to keep the rankings? Will it cause www.the.com/page to redirect to www.a.com/page or it will redirect everyting to the home page of www.a.com? Thank you!
Don't visit these domains, I have put them here just as examples for the sake of explaining things, I have nothing to do with these domains, nor with their content!
The second option you mentioned here would be the correct solution. You have to redirect all the previous pages/folders/subfolders, even if you don't change their names.
In your case, page to page redirection will be the best solution. It will carry forward your backlinks and PR. As far as rankings are concerned, they may dwindle for a while... but things will bounce back to normal very soon.