I am trying to change from www.blue-wigets.com to www.bluewigets.com without losing my SE traffic. I will have to have them both up at the same time in order to transfer the traffic without losing sales. Since these will be mirror sites, will it hurt to have both of them on the same dedicated server with different IP addresses? If anyone has any other suggestions, please let me know.

use a 301 redirect. But bear in mind that the new name may well be subject to the Google age delay so you may well loose rankings and traffic for several months.

Not something to be done lightly or on a whim these days. I did this for a client on a change of business name, still waiting for their rankings to recover 9 months on. Fortunately the site is not there to generate leads or sales to any great extent.

Thankyou for responding. What if I were to make www.bluewigets.com into a small non duplicate site just to get it into the index without any penalties. And then after 6 to 8 months I would start to make the transfer?

that may work though there could be glitches on the change over.

One thing to check first is that the new name has no history associated with it that could have resulted in a penalty or a banning. Far too many hostnames have been through the "crash and burn" process with the spammers that are now starting to appear back in the available pool or on domain sales sites.

I have read that 301 can cause your SE rankings to drop. I cannot afford that. I am thinking of slowly deleting pages on the old website while adding the deleted pages to the new website. I will also be transferring the backlinks as I do this. What do you think?

Any change can and will cause rankings to fluctuate just as doing nothing can cause the same, it's the nature of the beast.

A 301 redirect tells user agent to update and pointers to the new location. But if the new location is tainted (penalties, banning etc ) then redirecting will inherit that penalty.

To be safe, develop the new domain with unique content and ensure that it is not going to be a problem before transferring any content or backlinks

Thanks, the new domain has been on sale at buydomains.com for several years so I dont think that should be a problem. However I do intend to go very slowly and with alot of testing.

One more person to add to the 301 Redirect Vote. Slowly it will have the PR and serps transfer to the new domain. Also http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articl...1-redirect.htm link will help you a lot.