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I snooped around in the Google Webmaster Tools help section and it seems like a lot of other people have faced the same problem with no solution offered. Shame on Google! As much as possible, I would go back to all the sites that were linking to your old domain and ask them to update their links. 301s pass most of the link juice, but not all of it, so it's worthwhile to save as much as that as possible. It also helps Google start to ignore your old site and focus more on your new site. This is all probably a lot of work, but I hope it works out! Good luck. Andrew

Hey, I had immense trouble with GWT because it wouldn't accept my domain name (.vic.edu.au) and kept coming up with the error 'not a root level domain) even though it was the correct domain. I checked with their bug tracker and several people with obscure domain names had the same problem. It will let me submit the site and use most GWT tools but not the change of address tool and a couple of others - any thoughts on how to make GWT re-index my site faster anyway? Thanks, Anthony

Per Google's recommendations, I'd change the links to the new website.

Michael, you might want to open a new question for this, as old threads don't get bumped when new content appears. If you don't have any content or anything on the exact match domains, the 301 really isn't going to help you.

For #1, your approach is solid. For #2, the waiting period length is dependent upon how quickly your entire site is updated in Google. This time period varies based on the size of your size, how deep some content is within your site, the popularity of your site's pages, and other factors. Post migration you want to confirm the 301 is working, ensure your pages are canonicalized correctly, then submit an updated sitemap to Google and Bing. Presently your Google SERP should show the links to your existing domain. After the migration, your most popular pages should show the links to the new domain within a day or so. It would not be unusual for it to take several weeks for all your pages to be updated. I would recommend waiting to make changes until after the majority of the site's pages had their URLs updated in SERP. That is the best measure that the migration has gone smoothly. Post migration, you can then make any desired changes to the site and track the results from those changes without wondering about worrying about the migration contaminating your results. For site-wide changes, you can start off with adjusting a few pages and see how your results are impacting before applying the change to your entire site. The campaign tool is wonderful. Look at the tutorial and learn everything you can about it. It can help you measure and track your site's SEO performance.