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When moving a site to another domain is it a good idea to leave the sitemap.xml in place and not 301'ed to the new site so that google bot has a record of all the links on the old domain and when in crawls them it will follow the 301.

Or is it a better idea to blanket 301 everything including the sitemap.xml from the old site to the new site ?

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    If you are moving a domain, a sitemap should not be found on your old domain - that would be useless and potentially confusing. Generally, I recommend a blanket redirect (redirect every request as is) from the old domain to the new domain and then any specific redirects, for example, /foo -> /foobar on the new domain. This simply makes life easier and cleaner. Cheers Mate!! – closetnoc Oct 1 '16 at 15:52
  • @closetnoc why you post most of your answer in comment. This one is really acceptable. – Goyllo Oct 2 '16 at 6:38
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In my experience, it's best to leave the sitemap files in place without any changes. My theory is this gives google a chance to recrawl the list of old urls to find the 301 redirects and update them to the new urls.

This is what I've drawn from doing a couple domain changes and rewrites from http to https on sites with thousands of indexed pages. It might not matter as much for a site with only a couple dozen pages.

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