I'm using multisite to host my client sites.

During development stage, I use subdomain to host the staging site, e.g. client1.mydomain.com.
And here's how it look under the SITES folder:

/sites/client1.mydomain.com

When the site is completed and ready to go live, I created another folder for the actual domain, e.g. client1.com. Hence:

/sites/client1.com

Next, I created symlinks under client1.com for FILES and SETTINGS.PHP that points to the subdomain
i.e.

/sites/client1.com/settings.php --> /sites/client1.mydomain.com/settings.php

/sites/client1.com/files --> /sites/client1.mydomain.com/files

Finally, to prevent Google from indexing both the subdomain and actual domain, I created the rule in .htaccess to rewrite client1.mydomain.com to client1.com, therefore, should anyone try to access the subdomain, he will be redirected to the actual domain.

This above arrangement works perfectly fine. But I somehow feel there is a better way to achieve the above in much simplified manner. Please feel free to share your views and all advice is much appreciated.