Changed URL.how long for Google to catch up?

I used mod_rewrite but traffic took a dive

[designinmom]

We recently changed the URL of our site, which had a Google pagerank of 6 and about 400 indexed pages. We made the change because the former URL was more difficult to say out loud and had a hyphen. The new URL suits us very nicely and we're glad to make the switch.

Following advice on another site, I put the following in the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.olddomain\.org$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.org/$1 [R=Permanent]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain\.org$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.org/$1 [R=Permanent]

It works. Any hit to olddomain.org/page or www.olddomain.org/page goes to www.newdomain.org/page.

I used Google sitemaps and all the pages are indexed. When I look for site:olddomain.org or site:www.olddomain.org there are only a small handful of pages listed. The new URL is in Yahoo Directory and DMOZ. I've notified as many of the sites that link to us as I could of the change. Most are still using the old URL, though.

I'm doing everything right, no?

We did this in mid May and now our traffic is feeling serious pain. We're off the map on keywords we used to do well on. Traffic is down by at least 50%, and where we used to do 60-70% from search engines we're now doing 30-40%. I have to imagine that we're being punished by our current pagerank of 0.

My question: Is there anything else I can do to get our site back where it was? How often does pagerank update? Should we get our "6" back when it does? Sites that I've found that predict future pagerank are saying that it will still be 0 which doesn't make me happy. I have to hope that they're not taking the redirect into consideration. How long should we expect it to take for the site to recover? I can be patient if I know there's a light at the end of the dark tunnel.

Thanks in advance.

[edited by: jdMorgan at 3:42 pm (utc) on June 11, 2006]
[edit reason] Formatting [/edit]

[jdMorgan]

Since this forum is about Apache, we don't usually address Google-specific issues here. But I'd guess you should allow at least 90 days for this situation to settle down. If you want to pursue this in-depth, please post to the Google forum [webmasterworld.com], where you'll benefit from far more opinions and experience than are available here in this technical forum.

But since this is an Apache forum, I'll add that your code can be shortened and made port-independent and more efficient like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?olddomain\.org [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.org/$1 [R=301,L]

Anyone considering changing domains (or even just a few URLs) should consider that there *are* serious short-term consequences to ranking and traffic, and take this into consideration.

Jim

[edit] Added "short-term" to final sentence to clarify. [/edit]

[edited by: jdMorgan at 8:25 pm (utc) on June 11, 2006]

[designinmom]

Thanks, Jim. You're right. I should have posted this in the SEO-related forum. My main concern for posting here was to make sure I edited my .htaccess file correctly.

I changed to the code you recommended. Much obliged. :-)