Safest way to move to new domain

Without incurring duplication penalty ...?

[vmaster]

When I started my site, I went for mysite.com domain as the corresponding .co.uk domain was unavailable. Now, the .co.uk has become available, and it would be in my interest to move my site to mysite.co.uk. However, I am not sure what might be the best way to get around this. Should I purchase the .co.uk domain and also point it to the same nameservers, so that the site may be accessed at the same ip using mysite.com and mysite.co.uk simultaneously. I can then start the task of getting all the links to the new mysite.co.uk domain. However, isn't there a risk of duplicate penalty during the transition period. Since others might have been through similar situations, what would be the best way to go about this process without Google penalties?

[anallawalla]

First, get a UK host for the .uk domain, even if it is for a few months until you are indexed.

Next, place a 301 permanent redirect at the old site and point it to the .uk site. Just one of them is sufficient for redirecting googlebot and visitors to your new domain. It is painless.

- Ash

[killroy]

This has plagued me as well, and as I only recently started paying attention to this I found many of my domains penalised that have been "parked" on my main domain as alternates for many years, since long before this constituted penalisation.

From the forums I gathered that a 301 redirect is the best way to go.

So you should moave all your site to mydomain.co.uk and set it up jsut like your old one.

Then, in apache, you set up the old domain like this:

ServerName www.mydomain.com
Redirect 301 / [mydomain.co.uk...]

This all your proper links should come in accordingly and google should correctly attribute their PR bonus to you main site. You can then contact the incoming link providers at your own leisure.

<added>Ash was quicker on the submit button ;)</added>

[sullen]

does Google really penalise for 2 domains pointing to the same site? Surely if the sites are on the same ip it is clever enough to work it out? (mind you, it's not clever enough to take frames into account...)

I have several sites with several domain names pointing to them - most show the same page rank on the secondary domain names, although 1 shows the page rank only on the main doamin (the one people link to).

[shrirch]

I've not seen a major penalty (sites have always been PR 5) for my site where .biz,.org,.net and .com point to the same site.

[killroy]

Well, as for my case, I live in a coutnry split into two major islands. One with the same name as the country and a second one.

I had the domains
www.somethingisland1.com
and
www.somethingisland2.com

Both pointing at the same page with information about businesses on both islands.

They were doing both great until recently that I noticed the second domain reduced to a PR 0. :(
Maybe it had to do with the fact that they were actaulyl on different IPs (although in the same computer) due to technical reasons. I've now changed the second domain to a 301 redirect and I hope that eventually the penalisation will be lifted.

to GoogleGuy > The site is very large, one of the largest of this (small) country. Could it be that this was a manual intervention by Google rather then an automatic process? And how can I cause a review of the situation?

Thanks

SN