Moving content to newly purchased domain

what's the best way

[miedmark]

Let's say that you own widgets.us for about 1 year now, site indexed by google,msn and yahoo and getting some results.

Now, you purchased widgets.com (just became available). How do you transfer all the content to widgets.com? Widgets.com does not exist in search results. Do you:
a) Put content on both sites and forward widgets.us to widgets.com?
b) Remove content from widgets.us and place content on widgets.com and transfer .us to .com?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[g1smd]

You don't want a new site as that might take a year or more to be indexed.

You don't want two sites to be seen, as that will cause you "duplicate content" grief.

Use a 301 redirect from the new domain, for all pages of that domain, redirecting to the old domain.

The new domain will capture and forward all type-in traffic, without risk of any of the URLs at the new domain being indexed.

The old domain will continue to be indexed, as before, without penalty.

[tedster]

I agree completely. Last year we tried to talk a business out of moving everything to the companyname.com that they had just purchased. They wanted to move from the companyname.org that was their original, but compromise domain. They went ahead against our advice and it was 9 months to recover Google traffic and listings.

Forutnately, because of our discussions they were prepared for the bump in the road and took many intelligent steps to sustain income during that period. Now all that marketing activity has boosted them immensely and I suppose long term they are in great shape. But right now there is just no way to "transfer" over to a new domain and have Google stay happy with you.

[miedmark]

A year to recover, hmmm. It is tempting - .com sounds so much better than .us. Thank you guys for your inputs. I think I'll do the redirect for now.