Hi, first will doing a 301 redirect of an example.com domain to another.com domain redirect the PageRank of ALL the pages belonging to example.com? If so, how long until search engines (especially Google) redirect the page permanently? That is, when if ever can the old domain name be gotten rid of and the .htaccess file with the 301 redirection removed from the server? Thanks for your help!
I just did this on a domain and it took about a week for Google to do it, but it will really depend on how often your site is crawled. MSN still hasn't caught it though, and its been about 3 weeks now. Your best bet, it to set up Google Sitemaps/Webmaster tools for the new site(or whatever they are calling it now) so that you can see when google has indexed the new site.
Thanks! Anyone know... will Google assign the new site on the new domain the same rankings or will it be sandboxed?
Your new site will get assigned the PR, I think for each page to get the old site's PR, you need to do a 301 for each page from the old to the new. Plus, it will take a while for it show up in the toolbar (it won't show right away). You have probably missed the window for this upcoming PR update, so it make take 4 months for the PR to show in the toolbar. It may affect your rankings, it all depends. For example, does the new domain have keywords in URL? Is the new domain younger? Even though the PR will transfer, there are other factors that will affect the SERPs.