I'm not someone who likes to jump on the bandwagon with everything Mr. Cutts has to say, but his latest blog entry is a must-read. It's on the subject of two items - moving a domain to a new web host and moving an old domain to a new one. In the case of the former, Mr. Cutts' advice is no different than what any experienced webmaster would recommend. This quote, however, is of particular interest for anyone wondering about the long-gone days of the "Google Dance":

That also helps explain the “Google Dance” of days gone by. The Google Dance would last for about a week, and people would see both old and new results, depending on which data center they happened to hit. The underlying reason was that each data center was brought down, loaded with new data or algorithmic settings, and then brought back up again. It took several days to switch the data at all data centers. During that time, webmasters used to love to check www2.google.com and www3.google.com because those DNS aliases usually pointed to the newest data centers. These days our production system is better equipped to switch things around quickly instead of over several days.

But, on to more important matters. The real meat of the post doesn't come until the end, when Mr. Cutts reveals a little more on 301ing old domains to new ones (emphasis mine):

Now let’s talk for a minute about moving from mattcutts.com to someotherdomain.com. All other things being equal, I would recommend to stay with the original domain if possible. But if you need to move, the recommended way to do it is to put a 301 (permanent) redirect on every page on mattcutts.com to point to the corresponding page on someotherdomain.com. If you can map mattcutts.com/url1.html to someotherdomain.com/url1.html, that’s better than doing a redirect just to the root page (that is, from mattcutts.com/url1.html to someotherdomain.com). In the olden days, Googlebot would immediately follow a 301 redirect as soon as it found it. These days, I believe Googlebot sees the 301 and puts the destination url back in the queue, so it gets crawled a little later. I have heard some reports of people having issues with doing a 301 from olddomain.com to newdomain.com. I’m happy to hear those reports in the comments and I can pass them on to the crawl/indexing team, but we may be due to replace the code that handles that in the next couple months or so. If it’s really easy for you to wait a couple months or so, you may want to do that; it’s always easier to ask crawl/index folks to examine newer code than code that will be turned off in a while.

This is some incredible information. It tells me that Google is familiar with their incredible problems handling 301s from one domain to another. My guess is that they have some funky code that they can't seem to fix without removing their safeguards against malicious activity and distrust of new sites. In any case, my recommendation has always been "don't 301, just stick with what you've got", but now that advice has even more backing. I just wonder how long it will be until SEOmoz.org is finally recognized by Google as a real website :)