Hi guys, need help getting out of a slight jam. I know this topic has been discussed very often here and I went through a number of posts but couldn't find a firm solution that I should go with. So if someone could even direct me to the right post, it would be much appreciated...

Ok, the situation -

A few months ago I launched a website as a result of boredom and putting to good use some work I had done for a client and not been paid for, I also had a domain which wasn't being used. This site has only now started showing up in search engines and has just a few days ago been fully indexed by google. The issue i'm facing is that the domain is totally mismatched to the content of the website. So now I have gotten us a better suited name and redesigned the whole website to work better(IMHO).

My Worry -

As I mentioned all the pages have only just been indexed and I don't want to loose the traffic to the domain or the keyword traffic to the sub pages. How should I go about redirecting the site?? I'm on linux servers.


Should I...
...redirect the top level domain and let the search engines figure out the rest, insert a 404 with a link maybe and a google search box for the new domain(it will of course be a while before the new domain is indexed, months maybe from what I read somewhere).

Or, should I redirect the domain and every individual page of the current website to the corresponding page on the new domain(is this possible, guess i'll need to mess with the .htaccess for this), if so could someone tell what is the most SE friendly way to do it on a linux server, if it is really required.

Pretty confused right now on how to safely move the website and I can't let it carry on the way it is currently setup. Please help, any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks
Deep