Comments on: Change Domain Names: Maintain Search Engine Ranking

By: Jill Olkoski

Jill Olkoski — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 04:39:48 +0000

Hi Leone,
It looks like the SurfAlaska site has the actual content and that LeonesHomes is just redirected to it. Therefore, there is no real content on LeonesHomes and Google will never crawl it because there is nothing to crawl. Any links that you get to LeonesHomes will NOT be credited towards SurfAlaska – and so I would recommend having all links go to the main website, SurfAlaska where the content is. So what you have won’t hurt anything, just make sure all links go to SurfAlaska. I have clients who have certainly bought easy to remember domain names and then used redirects – but the main website needs to get the links and will be crawled because there’s where the content lives.

By: Leone Harris

Leone Harris — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:30:17 +0000

I have a Real Estate website that is 4 years old. It ranks on the second page of Google. I wanted to change my domain name to a shorter easier name to remember. I bought the new domain name http://www.LeonesHomes.com and permanently pointed it to http://www.SurfAlaskaRealEstate.com. My question is this, if I advertise http://www.LeonesHomes.com and build up the inbound links to my site using that web address which website will google crawl? Will google be directed to the old website and will it continue to crawl the old website? There is no actual page for http://www.LeonesHomes.com as it is directed to http://www.SurfAlaskaRealEstate.com. I know this seems to appear a bit backwards but I can not take the risk of losing traffic right now. I am open to suggestions.

By: Jill Olkoski

Jill Olkoski — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 17:54:49 +0000

Hi Tecnoscopio,
Hopefully it will go back up. Most importantly, make sure you have a new sitemap that’s referenced in a Robots.txt file, and make sure that all of your old pages are redirected via a 301 redirect in an .htaccess file to the new pages. Super duper important. My traffic did indeed recover, and now it’s better than before. But I did have to wait out a several month long traffic slump.

By: tecnoscopio

tecnoscopio — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 17:32:41 +0000

I’m going through the same thing. I changed my domain to http://www.tecnoscopio.com and went from near 250 incoming visitors from google per day to 5 visitors. It declined pretty rapidly and hope it will recover completely. Its good to see that your site recovered, at least it gives hope.

Tecnoscopio
http://www.tecnoscopio.com

By: Curtis

Curtis — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:48:06 +0000

Thanks for the article and especially the illustrative charts. My site http://www.snapspans.com just plummeted in traffic and I am trying to find out why.

What I got from your experience (other than an appreciation for methodical action) is that the lag-time for crawls and search results looks like a month minimum.

Snapspans is very new, and I think I was mostly lucky in the first month. Encouraging to read yours bounced back above where it had been.