Changing Domains

[jgalt1]

I started my website with a domain I'll call, for the sake of this discussion, olddomain.com

I didn't like that name so I registered newdomain.com
and "parked" it to olddomain.com

when I search google for newdomain.com
it shows my website but lists the url
as olddomain.com

Seemingly worse, when I check with link:newdomain.com
it only shows 1 link and that is
under olddomain.com

All of my incoming links are to newdomain.com

If I leave things as they are will this be a problem
for me as far as PR goes?

I've only recently, in the last month or so added the incoming links so I'm not sure if I just need more time or if I need to somehow rename olddomain.com to newdomain.com with my webhosting company.

Any suggestions?

[Marcia]

First of all jgalt1, check and see whether the "parked" domain is returning a 301 or a 302. Then there will be a bit more to go on.

Server Header Checker [searchengineworld.com]

Is the new domain "parked" at the regisrar's and pointed to the old domain.?

[hutcheson]

You've done things backwards. (The horse's tail points TOWARDS the cart.)

Put the actual website at the NEW domain, and let the OLD domain name redirect (preferably using the 301 redirect.)

[jgalt1]

Thanks for your responses. I get the following using the "Server Header Checker" for newdomain.com

Status: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 12:49:51 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.2 PHP/4.3.1 FrontPage/5.0.2.2510 mod_ssl/2.8.14 OpenSSL/0.9.6b
Last-Modified: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 21:57:37 GMT
ETag: "3bc058-a706-3fb15b51"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 42758
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=10000
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html

I don't see any 301 or 302. I guess those are redirects.

It isn't clear to me what "parked" means. It seems just that my DNS entry for newdomain.com is pointing to olddomain.com. They are both hosted on the same server using name-based virtual serves and cpanel system I believe.

On my webhosting cpanel "system", I only have an account for olddomain.com and have newdomain.com "parked" to it.

I do belive that I have things backwards and I just need to figure out how to switch them or have my hosting company switch them.

I have an email to them asking them to switch them. I'm just hoping that I can do it without copying all my html/mysql/cgi-bin/cron/auto responders to a new account.