Due to a trademark issue with a domain, I have been asked to change domains. I've done this and set up a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain. I plan on starting a link building program to the new domain and doing what I can to have sites update their links. They are asking me to park the domain after 9 months or so. Q: Outside of the obvious traffic that I might have come from old links in blogs, etc., what kind of impact would it have on the new site if I park the old domain after say 1 year of having a 301 in place? I'd like to resolve the situation amicably, but don't want to agree to something that would seriously damage all the work I've done to achieve high rankings. BTW, many of the old rankings have already transferred over.
Would that be an issue either way? I assume I've lost value on backlinks when I set up the 301? Traffic from blogs linking to the old site would probably be negliable 1 year from now.
Did a similar thing a short while ago. The PageRank was forwarded during the last PR update (and increased). What seems to be the case though is that Google interpret the 301 as a large number of backlinks to your new domain. Basically its as if your new domain got a bunch of links from your old domain. Since the 301 is a permanently moved redirect I guess sooner or later Google (and other SE's) drop the backlink concept and realise its the same site. But needless to say, changing domain is never any fun from an SEO perspective and will. Which of your domains is Google currently indexing (or both)? Which has higher ranking? The new or the old?
The old site has about 90k pages indexed, which is about the same amount when I set up the 301 (about 2-3 weeks ago). The new site has 33k indexed and showing zero backlinks.
Have you submitted the new domain to Google Webmaster Central, verified it and submitted a sitemap there? Otherwise, try that. After a couple of weeks doing what you did, I got thousands of backlinks from the old domain in Google. MSN and Yahoo seem to be quicker than Google at taking the 301 into consideration, they dropped the old domain and started ranking the new in same position almost instantly. What do they say about your domains, do they list both?