Forum Moderators: phranque
The unintentional result of this has been that all the pages that I've redirected to the new domain have lost their ranking in the serps.
The reason that I reference Trustrank™ is that the Pagerank™ of the redirected pages is the same as the destination pages (as far as I can see, I know it's incremental)-they are both pr1 (before pr disappeared).
So, is the most important factor in trustrank the age of the domain?
The content is the same...
These pages had been ranked consistently within the top 3 positions for over a year-mostly #1.
Any insight into how I can recover my ranking in the serps?
Or other ideas as to why I've lost position?
You mean I should've uploaded the new site over the existing .net site and 301ed all the old links to the new pages under the same domain?
Or is that not at all what you meant?
I considered this tac, but ultimately abandoned it because the product migration is very time consuming. Perhaps I should cut my losses and do it anyway?
I'd be effectively cutting my store down 75% product-wise, as well as inviting more possible errors......... Is it worth it?
As far as I know, there is nothing you can do to fix this after the fact, it's too late.
Changing domains is something that should only be done as a last resort, with the understanding that you will most likely lose 90% or more of your traffic on the new domain until it is lifted from its sandboxed state, 301's don't help this at all from what I've seen.
The correct procedure would have been to simply 301 .com to .net, then rebuild .net to create your new version. Then start rebuilding the site from the inside out, harder to do but would have cost you no penalty. Again, google now has a mass of conflicting data on your two domains, switching back would probably but maybe not worsen the situation. As far as I know there's virtually nothing you can do to fix this now, domains form an integral part of google's system, and should never be messed with.
I just did a full rewrite of an existing site, kept domain, all urls changed, most 301'ed to new pages, all pages rewritten, and I didn't see so much as a blip in our traffic. Other's haven't been so lucky, but I don't know if they were careful with the 301's, hard to say.
Can anyone sum it up in one sentence for a Noob?
Guess I better start building.
How good and on topic are the sites/pages linking to you?
"I've sent them an email so they (someone) knows that I'm not attempting anything shady."
Waste of time but if it makes you feel better do it. They don't care about stuff like this.
akmac, when you changed URLs you lost all your good incoming links. The best thing to do now is to start writing to all those sites that used to link to yuou and tell them you have a new URL.
