icarus - 8:09 pm on Dec 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

Just another brief update for anyone who's still interested.

It's now nearly a month since the http:// to [www...] 301 was implemented for our main site. It was done correctly and various other checks carried out per the advices from various WebmasterWorld members who are familiar with related issues.

Since that time..

- no change in G traffic, still way, way down and has been like this since the day after implementing the 301 (Nov. 6)

- link:www.site.com brings up the usual number of links

- PR remains static (6 for home page)

- link:site.com shows 0

- site:www.site.com doesn't bring up the home page first

On our few other sites, site:www.othersite.com brings up the home page as the top listing and it's the same for other sites I've tried at random. Yahoo and MSN don't display the same problem - home page is always first.

Dayo_UK has made mention of this type of issue in the Jagger update threads.

It's as though our home page has still lost it's "oomph", the effects of which is being passed on to the rest of the site in terms of rankings on various queries, which were basically rock-solid before - some for years.

Some pages have held up better than others, mainly those that have many external links pointing to them, but the overall dampening effect is definitely across the board; for some pages, quite extreme.

I can still find the home page at the top of the SERPs by querying:

site name
site.com
www.site.com

Other queries do bring the page up, just well down. There's no uniformity to the drops on various queries in relation to the home page.

Googlebot still on the site basically 24/7 and the home page is being regularly crawled. Fresh tags appearing on home page every couple of days per normal.

Out of curiosity - have others who have recently implemented the 301 fix seen link:site.com numbers restored to normal? I remember that a few other people mentioned this being an issue.

I guess my only advice at this point, and only based on this single experience, is that the site-wide 301 http:// to [www...] (or vice-versa) fix should not be implemented unless you feel it's a critical issue and you're already suffering.

If you do implement it, be prepared to take a further hit for an undefined period. I guess it's possible that something else is the cause of our woes, and it could have gone this way regardless with all that was going on with Jagger - but the timing is a bit too much of a coincidence IMO. Perhaps if Google was working on the canonical issue at the time we implemented the fix, we've just thrown a spanner in the works?

There's other more experienced WebmasterWorld members who would probably disagree with this, especially those who have used this fix many times before with success, and I respect that. Just my added 2 cents on the subject. If things bounce back, I'll be sure to report as such :).