We are currently expanding our site to cover more than our domain name would lead one to believe. For this reason, we have purchased a new domain that will cover our full range of topics. We have been on the web for a few years, and only now am I getting into SEO, but we do get a decent amount of traffic and our site comes up with all kinds of relevant searches (mostly hits on our wiki). What would be the best approach to transitioning to the new domain? Obviously we will need redirects, and I am afraid of how many pages we currently have linked out there. I have both our forum and wiki installed and running on the new domain, so basically it is functional on both domains (pulling from the same databases). Should we go ahead and submit the sitemaps on the new domain ? Will this hurt us for running duplicate content on 2 domains? Any guidance would be appreciated.
Hello toykilla, I -usually- would recommend a 301 redirect to each equivalent page on your new domain, but Google seems to have issues (in my case, at least) of processing them correctly. I shifted from a subdomain to domain/folder/ infrastructure like 2-3 months ago and it's still showing thousands of pages indexed for the subdomain. In theory, you won't get duplicate content once you put the redirects in place (and they're spidered) so basically your next step is to setup the 301s and ensure that everything is running smoothly. I would -then- consider the sitemaps afterwards.