Ranking Drop after 301 Redirect

[giateno]

Hi,

1 week ago, we made a redirect between two domains. The situation was the following: we had the site on sitename.olddomain.com with currentdomain.com redirecting to it. We had this situation for around 3 years. Now we decided to come back to currentdomain.com, so we made sitename.oldomain.com redirect to it, with 301 redirect. The layout, code and content is the same as before.

For some absurd reasons, our rankings dropped for around 80% of our keywords/pages, whereas the situation remained the same for around 20% of keywords/pages. So now we have a little part of our best keywords still with rank #1, but the main part dropped.

Any ideas? What happened?

[tedster]

A 301 redirect is not an instantaneous way to save all your rankings. Google will take some time to process the change, analyze how much trust should be given to the new urls (because people do try to manipulate rankings with 301 redirects) and so on.

Not too long ago, reports of several months worth of ranking problems were common after a 301. Today traffic usually comes back a lot quicker -- but a one week traffic drop after a 301 is not necessarily a sign of a real problem.

I'd say double check your technical steps (especially any kind of canonical url issue) but mostly wait a bit longer.