I have a fan site for a local sports team that I follow that I started a while back and sort of just left it behind. Anyhow, I've got a little more time now and I want to get back into it. Its not a big moneymaker, but I do run some AdSense to offset the hostings costs and hopefully make a couple bucks - no big deal.

Anyhow the site has been at www.domain.com/fansite for about 4 months, and actually has decent rankings for the terms relating to it in Google. The site its on, www.domain.com is a directory site I have had up for a couple of years.

My question - I'd like to change the domain name so its just www.fansite.com rather than www.domain.com/fansite. However, I don't want to lose the link popularity associated with the site (although its not much), and more importantly I don't want the new URL to be sandboxed for like 6 months.

If I do a 301 will I still have the sandbox problem? I suppose the answer is yes otherwise everyone would just create a directory on an older site and 301 redirect that to a new domain to avoid that issue. I suppose I'm also going to lose any benefit of the www.domain.com link popularity in general (although its mostly not related, two seperate topics which is why I want a new domain). Thoughts?

There are people who have reported doing a 301 to a new domain for existing sites, and it seems the new domain ended up sandboxed.

Very interesting - I was sorta expecting that might be the case.

I guess my best course of action might be to build the site on the new domain, and start getting some links to it to get the sandbox process rolling, while the current site still ranks well. I'll have to be careful about duplicate content, but I'm likely going to do a redesign as well so I can probably avoid duplicate content and just have similar content on two sites for about the next six months or so, until the new domain takes hold and climbs out of the sandbox, then I think a 301 should help unify the two?

Thoughts?