Unused .com domain showing in rankings while .biz isn't

[tmtim]

Hello guys,
I have a strange issue that I just can't figure out how to fix. Here is the deal, When this business I work for was started someone grabbed our businessname.com domain and refused to give it to us. So we ended up using the businessname.biz domain for the last year or so and all of our brochures and marketing material has that domain on it.

Well we took legal action and eventually got that .com domain. At first I had it 301 redirecting to the .biz one and it wasn't showing in the rankings. The original .biz domain wasn't showing for our main keyword either though it did show up for some nice variations atleast.

After much work I did eventually get our businessname.biz domain showing up for our main keyword at like position 400 or something poor like that. Hey at least it shows up. The problem is that somehow my 301 redirect got removed from .htaccess and now the businessname.com address shows up for our main keyword at position 100 and our businessname.biz domain doesn't show up at all for it, The businessname.biz one does show up for our other good keyword variations though and the businessname.com one doesn't show up for them. Keep in mind that this is the same exact site with multiple domains pointing to it on accident. I noticed this businessname.com domain is doing pretty well for the keyword we really want so I am doing a domain wide 301 redirect to businessname.biz hoping that the .biz one will take over that slot. This has yet to happen though, it almost seems like Google doesn't like the .biz domain. No .biz domains are showing really for this market.

The keywords our businessname.biz domain is showing for really isn't too competitive and I guess we are only showing up there because we are the only relevant site for it so it has no other choices really.

My question is, Is it worth it for us to change our marketing material businessname.com and just start using that? I know I have asked before is .biz makes a difference and the answer has been no, but with this new evidence it just seems like Google really doesn't like that domain for some reason. There really is no reason for our main domain to show up sometimes at position 400-500 for our main keyword which is used in the domain as well. Where this site shows up is where it's past relevancy. The position 100 makes sense, which the .com one is showing at. It has to be something related to that?

Sorry this post is getting long.
Thanks for any help on this,
-tmTim

[encyclo]

There have been many discussions about preserving rankings when changing domain names, but in this case the ranking isn't an issue - when your site doesn't rank, then it is the marketing and branding issues and not the ranking issue which should be considered first.

Although Google have clearly indicated that there is no particular penalty for different TLDs, personally I wouldn't hesitate in this case to move to the more familiar .com for branding purposes. Use a 301 permanent redirect from the .biz to the .com, which will allow for an orderly transition for your site visitors and your off-line branding / communications too (ie. make sure the email addresses work with both domains).

The question then becomes, why is your site not ranking well? Link-building to your .com will be vital, as will a careful analysis of any technical or other obstacles to your site's success.

[tmtim]

Thanks for the reply,
I got permission to go ahead and redirect all .biz traffic to the .com domain by doing a site wide redirect with .htaccess which keeps the urls in place. It seems to work transparently, I have also requested a DMOZ update just in case. I guess the few links that we do have will still help us since we are using that 301 redirect anyway. We do place well with that .biz domain for 1 good keyword phrase (Pos 3 or so) but we all agreed that if we lost that rank it would be worth it to switch to .com anyway.

The plan is to migrate most links to .com that we can. Strangely, ever since the .com domain got into google it has been steadily rising at a rate of about 10 positions each week. Now that we have moved everything over to that I am hoping it will help it even more.

You are right, we do need to work more on link building. I am just scared to submit to directories or things like that out of fear that Google will change it's mind and penalize us for it. So far we are extremely white hat in our optimization efforts, maybe a bit too much. My boss has been urging me to try other tactics but I am reluctant to try that yet. So far we have gotten all of our contractors to link to us and I plan to help them optimize their sites a bit since in the end it would help us I'd imagine. There are some very easy fixes I can see on those sites (more descriptive titles and content, etc.)

Our content could use a bit of work, maybe a page describing why someone needs our product along with a history of our product which is something that all of our competitors lack I have noticed. They are more like a brochure with the product details only. That is sort of what has annoyed my boss, we have much more content and descriptive URLS/Titles but our competitors have hundreds of directory links and even sites linking to them that seem to be made with random content that links back to them. These sites are all interlinked as well, something a bit fishy there.

-Tim