I recently moved my blog from one domain, for example http://www.site.com/blog, to http://www.blog.com. It has already fixed a number of my sitemap and robots.txt recognition problems, but I have a few other problems to solve as well. First, I have checked Google's webmaster tools, and I can't make a change of address because the blog was not originally on the root level domain. Will Google be able to recognize the change of address naturally? Second, I have redirected most of the links, but I feel like it might be wise to go about redirecting the traffic a different way. Lastly, does anyone have any short-term suggestions? I think the move should increase my traffic over time, but any advice at all would be greatly appreciated.
301 Redirects works the best. You can fund more info about it here - http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php
Depends on how many backlinks you have, if you are smart about it you can sell off the old domain with a lot of backlinks for more money then it would cost to gain back the backlinks for the new site. But if now, 301 redirects are the way to go as stated before.
I appreciate all of the assistance. My site is built on Wordpress, so I picked up a redirection plugin that uses 301 redirects. Everything seems to be set up correctly now, but for some reason, 301 checkers (including one on the site referenced above) claim that search engines can't properly read the redirects! I'm pretty sure it's just because the original location of the blog was http://www.site.com/blog, and there must be some problem with how the redirect checker reads it.
make sure that the 301 redirects are pointed to the complete domain, also check to make sure that you are using the complete extension of the older website.