Moving from sub-domain to full domain... Google ranking?

changing domain name, incoming links, SERPS

[scoob]

When trying to submit our web site to ODP, we got rejected
on what seems to be an accusation of deep linking...
We naively used a sub-domain widget.maindomain.com.
Google top 6 listings in our category are in ODP and I
don't know that we could easily dislodge them w/o being
in ODP ourselves.

So we're contemplating moving to www.widget.com.
But we have quite a few hard earned incoming links.
I read that a 301 redirect (maybe even a mod-rewrite based one)
would maintain our Google SERPS for the next crawl and
that Google would then put the new domain in the index and
remove the old.

My concern is: What if some/many of the old incoming links
are NOT updated or take a loooong time to be updated.
Will Google still count them in the PR ranking?

Any advice / warnings in how to proceed?

Also: Having read that Google's DNS can take up to 2
months to update, I was thinking of creating a
temporary single page on the new site with our
main keywords in the text and point a few links
from the old to the new site and wait to switch
until I see googlebot in the logs of the new site.
Good idea or just paranoid?

Thanks!
- Scoob

[dwilson]

DNS caching will not be an issue for you if you are acquiring a new domain name.

I'll let someone else answer the more Google-specific parts of your question, however.

dwilson