Changing URL of website - strategy?

[Jeremy]

My client wants to change the name of his website. I have registered the new
URL and now both the new and old URLs point to the site.

What is the best strategy going forward? I am thinking that for a while
having both URLs pointing to the site is OK, but I worry that Google, MSN,
Yahoo etc will not index the new URL if I leave things the way they are. If
I ask the search engines to crawl the new URL and they find out it is the
same as the old URL, will they balk?

Would it be better to put the site under its old name on one website, and
the site under its new name on another website, and have people arriving at
the old site redirected to the new one? Would the search engines like this
approach better and be more likely to index our content under the new URL?

Do the search engine companies accept requests to "change URL", i.e. to
update their index based on the new URL?

Thanks for your insights!

Jeremy

 

[Tom J]

My client wants to change the name of his website. I have registered
the new URL and now both the new and old URLs point to the site.

What is the best strategy going forward? I am thinking that for a
while having both URLs pointing to the site is OK, but I worry that
Google, MSN, Yahoo etc will not index the new URL if I leave things
the way they are. If I ask the search engines to crawl the new URL
and they find out it is the same as the old URL, will they balk?

I went through that earlier this year. I made the new name the main
domain and the old name the add-on domain and had the old name roll to
the new name. My site still gets crawled 2 or 3 times a week by
google and others and the hits have quadrupled. The ranking actually
improved. Name changes are good many times!! I didn't report any of
this to the search engines and they never missed a beat- uh- crawl!

Tom J