Switch domain AND install vBSEO?

Hi,

I'm working on doing a VB upgrade on a site. At the same time we do the upgrade, we want to ditch the old domain (changing www3.sitename.com to www.sitename.com.) We are using apache2 with mod_rewrite. If we install vBSEO is there some way we can do the redirect from www3 -> www AND the vBSEO URL rewrite in one step, so we don't have a double 301 condition?

Thanks

Yes. this is actually built into vbseo by default. see this thread for more info:
[How to] Setup www.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com (www vs. non-www) - With .htaccess 301 redirects

in your case, it will be for both www3 and non-www -> www

That would result in a double 301, since they're going to hit vBSEO after they get sent to the right place. Aside from messing with Google webmaster tools am I right in assuming there's nothing more that can be done about it?

A double 301 won't pose any problem.
As long as the bots (and visitors) reach the correct URI within 5 redirects, it's fine.

Found a thread at Google Groups discussing it:
301 redirects are limited to 5 by GOOGLE - Crawling, indexing, and ranking | Google Groups