Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I would indeed disavow like you are already doing and keep your lists up to date with the data from Google Analytics, Moz, Majestic SEO and the other tools that are available. They'll keep you up to date on new links coming in, mostly GWT is running behind in doing this.

You will want to do the 301 redirect. That is the best way to address a domain name change. You would use a canonical tag if you were keeping both sites live, which isn't best practice. The canonical tag is not necessary when you use the 301 redirect. You will use the canonical tag to set the correct version of your URL, for example, if your set version is abcde.com and not www.abcde.com you will add a canonical tag to the page for abcde.com.

If you have decent rankings already I would hesitate to do this. While your rankings will eventually come back to where they're at now, there will DEFINITELY be some time in the middle where you're not doing as well.  The 301s suggested in other answers are a great (and necessary) idea. If you don't HAVE to do this, I would question it as well. It will definitely affect your site.

worked like a charm!  Thanks!

On your beta sites in future, I would recommend using Basic HTTP Authentication so that spiders can't even access it (this is for Apache): AuthUserFile /var/www/sites/passwdfile AuthName "Beta Realm" AuthType Basic require valid-user Then htpasswd -m /var/www/sites/passwdfile username If you do this as well, Google's Removal Tool will go "ok its not there I should remove the page" as well, because they usually ask for content in the page as a check for removal. If you don't remove the text, they MAY not process the removal request (even if it has noindex [though I don't know if that's the case]).

Look for some one with a proven track history of success. The problem with some offerings of link building are that they will offer a very low quality link building, usually an indication of a low cost provider.