One of my sites recently had a domain change. The former domain still ranks fairly well on Google and the other search engines. This former domain still has about eight months left before expiring.

What would be my best option for forwarding this traffic to my new domain, but making it as search engine friendly as possible? Ideally I wanted to leave a page up detailing the site has moved, the new address and then it forwards after about 10-15 seconds.

I was thinking a simple meta redirect? I have read however this may not be the friendliest approach for SE?

> www.google.com/webmasters/3.html

'..If your old URLs redirect to your new site using HTTP 301 (permanent) redirects, our crawler will discover the new URLs. For more information about 301 HTTP redirects, please see www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt..'

something like

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.example.com" );
?>


would do the job