301 Redirect 2 months ago - When Will Traffic Get Back To Normal?

[herculano]

Hi Everyone,

I did a 301 Redirect from my old domain to my new domain via htaccess and made sure I indicated in webmaster tools that there is a change of address.

In your experience how long does google typically complete the 301 redirect? I'm only getting about 5-10% of my original traffic. And it's been almost 2 months, to be exact it'll be 2 months in about 5 days.

PR seems to have moved over for most pages that I checked.. there's about 170+ pages... main page is about a pr4.

hope we can compare notes a little.

best regards.

[manny123]

Hi,
I redirected a subdomain of mine to a new domain recently and it went without a hitch. No traffic lost. The new site seems to be doing fine. I don't even think I did the GWT change-of-address setting either. I have seen other sites pull it off too, based on their Alexa rankings. One day they were one domain, the next day they were a new one with no loss of traffic. I would be concerned that something was not implemented correctly with your strategy. Good luck!

[HuskyPup]

Two weeks ago I merged two sites into one with the same directory structure and then moved them both onto a completely new domain, 301d both the originals and the new site and urls are ranking fine and traffic is where I hoped it would be.

At the same time I also moved a 1999 UK registered .com and moved it onto the identically named .co.uk url, basically a straight TLD name change into a ccTLD.

Within one week everything was working correctly and traffic is increasing at the moment, UK traffic up and US traffic is down, as hoped for.

[Planet13]

When I did 301 redirects from old domain to new domain, there was NO immediate traffic drop off.

About a week later, there was a little bit of readjustment of rankings, so some pages did better, some dropped a bit.

but if you redirected your site to a new domain, and you are only seeing 10% of your previous traffic, then something is seriously wrong, in my opinion.

[DeeCee]

Same experience. I moved a blog on a subdomain onto its own domain with a 301 redirect. Pages started moving over without a flinch.

@Manny123, I went to do a WMT site move But Big-G does not allow the specification of moves from subdomains. Only between base/root domains. So that was a bust. But as mentioned, the 301s seemed to have been enough.

@herculano,
It might theoretically be that the names of the domains involved had an impact?
Maybe big-G do not see the new domain as as good a keyword match to the content, and ranks differently? Just guessing here.

[klark0]

OP, recently did changes too. All pages were transferred and traffic remained the same after only a few days.

I suggest you check again for errors. Do internal pages on the old site redirect to the corresponding internal pages on the new site.

[herculano]

thanks for sharing your experiences... it does look we did something wrong...

we initially saw the traffic coming in properly and then poof... disappeared and now we are at 5-10%, this is also about a week...after the change just like planet13 we were anticipating this, but it never came back..

now, we're thinking maybe we need to reverse the change, however our new site had started getting some incoming links... not sure if it's gonna mess things up even further...

any suggestions what we should do?

[herculano]

we had the 300 Multiple Choice problem... talked about in this thread..

[webmasterworld.com...]

however, PR has already propagated over.. including internal pages... doesn't it mean.. google got it? also.. in WMT, there are no major errors, we have a couple of crawl errors which are pages that were removed that we used to point to... returning 404 errors.

[realmaverick]

I am not 100% sure if this matters, but have you updated your analytics, on all of your pages with code for the new URL?