My company operated with "domainname1" for several years.

The company wanted to rebrand itself from "domainname1" to "domainname2"

"domainname1" had been experiencing strong traffic growth through the first half of the year.

For the name changeover, initially, the the organic search results would name "domainname1" and then when a user clicked, they would be redirected to "domainname2". If a user directly typed the "domainname1" URL they were redirected to "domainname2".

A lot of the website's traffic comes from organic search on Google.

The webmaster then took down "domain name 1". Google organic search traffic plummeted. It's been four months and it has not recovered at all.

If I do site:domainname2 on google, the site is fully indexed.

I'm sure this is an incomplete description since I only know the basics of SEO, but from my description, can anyone help with what we should be asking of our technicians or checking to diagnose root cause? The answer I'm getting is that google "sees" the site as brand new, and has penalized it in the rankings accordingly. Somehow, I'm feeling there must be more to it than that since we did the inital redirects for several months, and it has been several months since the cutover with no improvement.

It sounds as if your webmaster took down the domain where you had 301 redirects (or possibly 302 redirects?) going to your new domain. You really should keep that domain up with page-by-page 301 redirects to domainname2.

The reason for this is:
302 tells google that this is a temporary thing, and not to index the other page.
301 tells google that the page has moved permanently, and that should index the new page / domain AND reallocate all of your inbound links to the new site.

Considering that keeping an old domain registered is not particularly expensive, I recommend that you keep the old domain up, and do your page-by-page 301 redirects so that people who bookmarked, who have old links or who did inbound linking to domainname1 still get to your site.

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How was the redirect done?
Joe

P.s feel free to contact me via Freelancer website designers - Shopping carts, web page design

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Other issues might arise through lost links that were previously pointed at domain name 1 for both the home page and internal pages on there - the value of these will have been lost. Also the new domain name will not have the trust history that the old one does - this is why keeping the 301 up is essential. Or, you could even bind the two domain names which is another way to solve the issue - this way domain 1 brings in the organic traffic and domain 2 is for branding and advertising - only draw back of this is that inbound links are sure to end up diluted between the 2 of them.


If you can find as many of the links that were pointing at 1 as possible and get them changed so they point at 2 this will help.

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He used 301 redirects

If you type "domainname1" it does redirect to "domainname2"

Here's the extra wrinkle. This website is itself a vertical search engine. So they are in a kind of unusual position - the pages are not static URLs like a regular ecommerce or lead generation site, they change as the content of what the vertical engine is indexing.

So here's an example in a vertical that is different from mine. If you are shopping for prices, there are a bunch of shopping search engines that will do price comparisons. When I go to google and type in, for example, "ugg boots", some of the organic results go directly to sellers of that product and some (many) lead to links for shopping price comparison engines like shopzilla, nexttag, dealtime, etc. Now if I as a shopper click on the google organic listing for nexttag, nexttag has prices and availability from across the web's merchants. If I want to buy, I click on the merchant listing on nexttag, and I go directly to their site. Nextag sells advertising, and of course, the more traffic they get, the more advertising revenue.

My industry (vertical category) is not retail ecommerce, but the example works the same way. For various popular searches, we have dropped down to the bottom third of the first page (if your first page is set to 100 results)... and can't seem to work our way back up the page. The page content and tags are optimized the same way they were prior to the name cutover... the only thing that changed is they are now listed with a URL of domainname2.com

Is there a tool I can use to see who is pointing at 1?

One way is a Google command:
link:http://www.domainname1.com

Also, check old web logs for referrer URLs. May be time-consuming, but it'll help you sort out the ones that drive both real traffic and link value.

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Dear Stratton,
Check Google for listings and backlinks of domainname1 and domainname2
EG:
link:domainname1.com
site:domainame1.com

link:domainname2.com
site:domainame2.com
See what Google lists for different pages.

Google warns that it does not like redirection. The best advice for people who want to change domain names is "don't do it." The site probably lost all its listings and has to start over. If the old domain name is still live or available you can leave all the old web pages and change the new ones just enough so they are not listed as duplicate content. If it is a constantly changing search, there should be no real problem of duplicate content. There is no reason I can think of not to leave the advertisements at both sites.

If it is an e-business, modify the old pages to note discontinued products and to point to the correct shopping cart software etc. - and put links to the new site on every page.
If the client is unable to host both

See Web design errors and pitfalls and other articles at SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Why didn't your web master simply park the new name on top of the old and leave your
existing link structures intact? You may still have time...If you do a search for siteldurl.com
and see links - you should jump on the idea of reversing your redirect strategy and use
a parking strategy instead. Links take time to build and knee jerk decisions will only have
your eyes rolling. Good luck.

Use either Yahoo Site Explorer or logged in to Google webmaster tools to check links. the link:domain search in Google will never give an accurate list.

by chance did you 301 redirect each and every page in domain1 to the new page in domain2?

and yes you need to check (search on google for instance) linked: then your domain name so eg. linked: domain1.com that will list the sites that (in this case) google shows as linking to your domain. Contact each of those links and request them to update their links to reflect the new page / domain.

That should make a HUGE difference...

Continue to build new IBLs to domain2

Hope that helps,

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website consulting (design, optimization, marketing) :: Follow Me: @orionsweb

Can you post a link so we can see what's happening?

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Changing your domain name means you have to start over. To keep all the old traffic you will have to have something on that old domain name.

What I would do is have the old domain point to some type of landing page with enough content and keywords to keep it listed and have it links back to your new domain.

This will keep it listed inform customers what is going on and help webmasters see that old links need to be changed.

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ouch... we haven't done that for about 4 years now! Now that will slowly kill your business, as the SEs will index the new page (what do you do with the rest of the site) you could end up with duplicate content..

If you 301 everything right away, resubmit your sitemaps to google yahoo etc. and get all your IBLs to point to the new domain I've only ever seen a slip to page 2 from top 10 for a couple weeks then right back at it..

Tricks are do it as quickly as you can... then leave the 301s up there for about a year, THEN after that i fyou want to use the OLD url you can as a landing page for an ad campaign or something and it won't hurt your new site.

It is good to do some of what you're saying there in the 1-3 month period leading up to the change over... In other words let people know in advance that on X date domain1.com will become domain2.com... GREAT time to do a bit of an upgrade to the look of the site, generate some excitement etc. Notify IBLs in advance etc.

It works nice if you have a small team of people to help with the transition.

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Ron Boyd
website consulting (design, optimization, marketing) :: Follow Me: @orionsweb

Have you tried Backlinks Checker Tool - Backlink Watch

Sorry for taking so long to get back to this thread

I wish I could post a link but I can't, the owner doesn't want it out on boards. the "my" in "my company"is that I work for the company, not that I own it.

Thank you for that resource Michelle

Thanks to everyone for their helpful suggestions. I learned some useful things from this thread. I did check the pack links and the new and old domains have about the same number of links pointing to it although some are the same and some are different.

I am still wondering how all of these SEO rules apply or not when the site is itself a search engine and so the content changes constantly as it aggregates new content from the sites it crawls.

Is that a 301 redirect or direct change of domain? you would lose all the links you worked for the last days . . .

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It doesn't matter the site is a search engine or a normal website, the backlinks are common. You can observe the same principle for Yahoo and MSN too.

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Can I throw the following discussion into the mix as well?:-

301 Redirect & Google Image Search

(Although it is not strictly a newbie question)...

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New domain name will not have the trust history that the old one does - this is why keeping the 301 up is essential. Or, you could even bind the two domain names which is another way to solve the issue - this way domain 1 brings in the organic traffic and domain 2 is for branding and advertising.

the link on the first post doesn't have PR. And I also think it won't give much traffic.

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