Redirected a newly purchased domain and lost ranking

[intravino]

Hello,

I purchased in January of this year, a domain name that was used by a competitor that went out of business a few year ago. The Domain did not had anymore incoming links. I purchased it because of the domain name and I did not want an other competitor to get it.

I did a redirect to one page of my website (the second page in value). But I noticed that my ranking did drop a lot even on the sure keywords that I've been number 1 for several years. I did drop a few places on the sure keywords but one the weak ones, I dropped to the second page.

Can be because of of this redirect?

The redirect was done on January and I dropped on the second week of April.

Thanks,


Intravino

[roodle]

Which page are you redirecting to which exactly?

[tedster]

Well, the ranking loss "could be" because of redirecting the newly purchased domain to the internal page - but with that timing it doesn't seem too likely to me. However, if you continued to promote or backlink to the newly purchased domain, I could see that creating a problem.

[intravino]

Which page are you redirecting to which exactly?

The old domain name that I purchased in JAN 2010 to my products page.
Forwarded (Http Redirect) on the webhosting's panel.


www.*****.com to www.my****.com/products.html

However, if you continued to promote or backlink to the newly purchased domain, I could see that creating a problem.

I did not promote, they only thing is when you search for the old domain in Google, the First hit is my products page website and the green domain name on the description of Google is the old domain name.


Thanks for your time,

Intravino

[tedster]

Does the redirect return a 301 http status?

[intravino]

Does the redirect return a 301 http status?

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: ******.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive



HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:41:04 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: www.****.com/products.html
Keep-Alive: timeout=2, max=199
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1


Thanks Again !

[tedster]

There's at least part of your issue. You've got a 302 redirect, which means "temporary" instead of "permanent" liek a 301 status. For a 302 redirect, Google will index the target URL's content but attribute it to he redirecting URL.

It remains to be seen how this might be affecting your rankings - but do make the change and find out.

[TheMadScientist]

I have personally had an established domain's home page redirected to an inner page on a site cause issues in the SERPs and definitely recommend against it... If you would like to redirect it I personally recommend redirecting home page to home page.

[intravino]

Thanks Guys ( tedster & TheMadScientist )


I will try without the redirect and if it is not that, I will redirect to main page only.

I tried something on my other domain name that is a redirect also.

It was also 302 previously, but this time I changed to it so you see the old name in the address bar on Firefox. It's a .ca domain.

When I run LiveHTTP headers, I get this now:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:25:25 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: close
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Expires: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:25:25 GMT
Content-Type: image/gif
Content-Length: 85

[BradleyT]

but this time I changed to it so you see the old name in the address bar on Firefox

Woah, that's even worse! You do not want 2 URLs to show the same content. You do not want example.com and example.ca to load the same page! You want one of them to redirect to the other one.

In my opinion the redirect has nothing at all to do with your rankings drop. If it really was the cause then you should point that domain at your competitors!