301 or 302 to Your New Domain?

There’s an excellent thread at SEO Chat about how to avoid the Sandbox when changing domains. For my money, the most informative post is from ModemMike, where he outlines just what happened to a site of his after 301ing old to new:

Back in July 05 I was forced to make a name change based on a legal threat of copyright infringement in the my domain name (1000’s of other websites doing the same thing but that’s not the topic) so I promptly did a 301 redirect from OLDDomain.com to NEWDomain.com changing nothing except the domain name itself, all URLs etc stayed the same. The 301 was implemented in IIS as a site wide redirect and within a few days I got 90% of my IBL’s changed. A couple of days later POOF, gone from Google were I had once been ranked in the top 5 for many relevant keywords. I thought maybe I had a penalty so I did what any reasonable webmaster would do and asked Google to which I got the standard reply “we suggest 301’s, no there is no penalty”. Here is what has happened since then.

1. The old domain has lost all PR (finally) but still has over 3,000 pages in the index (mostly supp)
2. The new domain has not received any PR in the toolbar but is listed nearly first in the Google directory based on PR.
3. A search for the old domain shows results for the new domain
4. BL’s have been credited to the new domain (138 to be exact)
5. A search for any of my more popular keywords does not show the site anywhere well, at least not in the first 1000 results
6. A search for www.OLDDomain.com and www.NewDomain.com both show the new domain as #1
7. A search for the “NewDomain” results in #1
8. allinurl, allintext and allinanchor show the site in pretty good positions and climbing weekly
9. The NEWDomain.com is not new (registered March 04) and was never spidered before this nor has it ever been registered.
10. Sandbox tool shows a score of about 30 (nice work on that randfish).
11. Google bot is by daily showing a fresh cache everyday for the home page and currently has an indexed count of 10300
12. The site uses (well used, I removed them) only a few affiliate links (like under 5)
13. The site does have a good amount of AdSense but is used really no different than anyone else.
14. The site has loads of original content, is what you might consider a vortal with active forums and daily updates
15. Totally went over the site with a fine toothed comb using Link Sleuth (very nice tool BTW, would suggest everyone try regardless… turned up several links I didn’t even no about in the forums and few pages that had gone server side error)… cleaned up the code, html, navigation about links etc…

Today October 5, 2005, still in the sandbox, lost all hope for a Google recovery over a month ago… domain name changes are a snadboxer for sure, no doubt, would wager a lot more $100 if I had any income these days… I have never used black hat SEO but I have to say that when white hat webmasters start getting slapped by Google as they have since 9/22 the dark side is looking very tempting.  I realize I will get flamed for this last comment but I’m being honest… I now own a dedicated server were I can age domain names like fine wine and wait for them to come out of the sandbox before spending any real time on them (simple portals, with a little content, build links but nothing more).

Emphasis mine. Earlier in the thread, Bernard states that he successfully escaped the box by “aging” the new domain:

The site did not get sandboxed. I should state that I had owned both domains for years. In fact, the “new” domain used to be DNS aliased with the “old” one. I did not change anything in the domain registrations for either domain except for the DNS settings on the “new” domain when I was ready to go live.

More discussion on 301s and 302s here and here.