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One month ago, we changed our site's URL. We had a very good reason for doing so. Among other reasons, the old URL had a hyphen and was harder to remember...the new one is real words and is easier to remember and has no hyphen.
Before, our site was getting around 225 visits a day during the week, around 65% from search engines. It had only been around for about a year. Page rank of 6. Around 400 indexed text-rich, keyword dense pages. We are a non-profit health advocacy organization so we're not expecting tens of thousands of visitors a day.
Our site was built carefully with CSS/XHTML and clean, valid code. Every page has a unique title. Most of the pages are part of Movable Type blogs. There's some depreciated HTML in there, but no tables and very little non-semantic code.
I put the following in our .htaccess file (getting some help from folks in the apache forum to do it):
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?olddomain\.org [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.org/$1 [R=301,L] I set up a Google sitemap and DMOZ has the new site listed, as does Yahoo Directory. All the pages are indexed with the correct URL by Google, and only about 100 pages are still in the index with the old URL. We are notifying backlinks that have the wrong URL of the new one, but shouldn't the mod_rewrite take care of that?
We are actively spreading the word trying to get our new URL on good-quality sites.
So what's the problem? Our traffic has taken a hit. We're down to around 100-125 visits a day with only 40-50% by search engines. Keywords that we used to be #1 on we're now off the map. Page rank is still showing 0. 1 wk. average Alexa rank is 312,914 which isn't that far off from where the old URL was so I'm not sure what's going on.
Aside from working on backlinks, is there anything else we can be doing? Is it just a matter of being patient? Provided we continue to keep our content fresh (the Movable Type blog headlines and summaries are updated on the front of the site each time a blogger posts), how long until we should see our old page rank back? I thought that the mod_rewrite would tell Google that it's a permanent change and the page rank would transfer...is that true?
Thanks in advance for any guidance you can provide.
I'm afraid mainly you'll just have to be patient. Best advice is to keep getting quality one way inbound links.
Can you differentiate your results by Search Engine? Typically for a long while now the worst effect is likely to be felt in the Google results, where a change of domain can cause between several months to a years worth of lost traffic. Y should make the change faster than G, but their pattern of updating is spotty and not all that frequent. MSN is likely to get the situation updated fastest, but of course they are not the lion's share of traffic.
Any one else had experience with changing domains recently? We have not done it in over two years now, nor have I recommended it for any client, given the pain associated with such moves.
Yahoo's cache is older than both MSN and Google, and they have only indexed 138 out of 400+ pages. Also terrible in keyword searches.
I think part of the problem is that the new domain was registered on 3/9/06. It's young. The domain, that is. It expires in 2009, which I intentionally did thinking of SERPs. The site is definitely not sandboxed (at least in Google) that I can tell, but I think we're being punished because of the domain registration. Do you think that's possible?
Because of our content (lots of text-rich pages on very specific topics related to cancer health advocacy), we do well in very specific, very niche searches. I hope I'm not violating any forum rules by reporting that for example, we are a top search result for 'sigmoid resection after diarrhea' Not exactly something you can plan for, and not exactly something that folks search for every day. ;-) As a matter of fact, when I look at our stats for the top 100 search terms since we changed the URL, only *12* have been from 10 or more visitors! The majority have been used 2, 3 or 4 times. Painfully slow to build a following this way.
But as long as I can make sure that I didn't do something stupid somewhere and I've done everything in my power to get our results back up there, all I can do is wait and I can live with that.
