icarus - 9:35 pm on Nov 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

Just a progress report/summary in case anyone is still interested:

- on Nov. 6.; noticed I had a http:// and [www...] listing. I was under the impression from reading quite a few posts on WebmasterWorld and other places that this was a very bad thing.

Implemented htaccess redirect from http:// to [www...] correctly, checked links on site etc. - [www...] was the higher pagerank page and the one that the most traffic lands on compared to [....] Site is well established, maintaining decent rankings fairly solidly for years.

- Nov. 7, lost around 66% traffic from Google - huge drop in rankings for most pages/terms

- Nov. 9 - backlinks to http:// reading 0. Backlinks to [www....] remained what they were prior to the redirect.

When I searched for my site name (not domain), The result displayed the DMOZ title on the link and the DMOZ description, then one of my sub-pages underneath that (with correct page title and description).

When searching on domain, only found http:// listing; cache date Nov. 6. [www...] listing nowhere to be found.

Googlebot active on site, including fetching the home page

- Nov. 10 - when searching on site name; DMOZ listing title still displaying, but the correct description now showing and it's now the [www...] page; couldn't find the [....] Cache date November 6. Rankings on the live results and .9.104 still well down on normal.

- Nov. 11 - Googlebot still fairly active on the site, fetched home page half a dozen times plus a couple of hundred other pages. Rankings on the live results and .9.104 no change, but I have noticed on *some* searches that the correct title is now displaying for [www...] listing. Homepage cache date is still Nov. 6; some sub-pages show Nov. 10. Traffic remains well down.

Still debating whether the htaccess redirect was a good move - definitely not for the immediate short term, but for the medium to long term? But as it's now been in place for over 5 days, very hesitant to remove it and perhaps make matters worse.

Anyway, if anyone's interested, I'll keep posting these progress reports from time to time - just let me know. If there's no response, I'll go back to my corner and remain quiet :).