Am I missing something if I absorb one site into another?

[GeorgeLaRochelle]

We are absorbing one of our sites into another and I want to make sure I am not missing anything. The site that is being absorbed will no longer exist as all the content has been replicated/duplicated on the main site.

About a month ago we added canonicals to all the duplicate content to point to the new site it will be a part of. That went very well and organic traffic continued to flow to those pages on the new site.

We recently (yesterday) used 301s on all the pages using mod_rewrites and redirected the domain name from the old site name to the new one.  Using mod_rewrites we redirect any other page linking to that domain to www.newsite.com?ref=oldsite.com. So far I dont see anything coming in on an unexpected link.

I still need to tell Google via Webmaster Tools that the oldsite is now on newsite.com correct?

Is there anything else I might bump into that we havent thought of?

Thanks

[GeorgeLaRochelle]

Well, to help the situation. I tried to use WBT to redirect and got this error message.

We couldn't verify oldsite.com. To submit a change of address, oldsite.com must be verified using the same method as www.oldsite.com. Add oldsite.com to your account and verify ownership, then try again.

I had www.oldsite.com in WBT and used it fine all the time. Is it because my DNS has already taken over and it cant find the verification file on the oldsite?

Update, I was able to add a site in WBT for oldsite.com and verify it. Then I was able to move www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com (oldsite.com is also moved to www.newsite.com)

To move a site you need both www.site.com and site.com in WBT and verified? I did not know that.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

I think WMT is sometimes annoying about it, but it makes sense. If you're pointing the whole site to a different site, I guess it makes sense that they want to verify you control the domain, and not just that one specific subdomain.

One other thing I would do is review your backlink profile - if there are some juicy links in there that you want to preserve and not lose some of their strength due to 301 depletion, I'd contact the webmasters and inform them of the change, asking them to update their links to the new URL to make sure you don't encounter any issues in the future.