Switching Domain and Redirectio

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Jeremy L. Knauff: Don’t simply redirect the domain. Set up individual 301s for each page, otherwise you’ll lose the majority of the SEO value you’ve built up.
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  Ryan Logan: I don`t care about losing SEO on the site that is going away. My goal is to preserve SEO on the target site.
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  Matthew van der Ende: Redirecting domain A to domain B won`t effect domain B`s rankings unless domain A has been spammed to death and has some kind of penalty.
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  Alan Bleiweiss: It all comes down to what you want that user experience to be. IF you 301, it still needs to be relevant page to relevant page if those exist, so as to not confuse visitors (and sure, in that scenario, any SEO value would be passed, except what we care about in your situation is usability only). AND if you 301, how will you communicate to existing clients "hey, don`t be confused - this is an intentional redirection because we`re now Company B!" or some similar message. Alternately, you can leave CompanyA domain in place for now, and put a custom message on that site that shows up upon first visit, but doesn`t reload on every page click in that site, where the message informs them of the upcoming transition. And then when you are ready for the switch, you can do those page to page 301s. I would NOT to a multi-page Site A redirect to a single page Site B point unless there`s zero relevance between the two sites. And if you go that route, I would still recommend you have that "here`s why you got redirected" message for such visitors.
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  Ryan Logan: Thanks guys. I believe the plan will be to throw up a landing page (no other pages) on Company A that mentions the transition and has a link to the new site. Then I’ll just drop the Company A site here soon.
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  Liew CheonFong: By the way, do not drop the domain name A. Keep the domain name as long as possible to avoid domain hijack (redirect domain A visitors to somewhere else)