Hi, I'm wondering if this was done right (I asked our old sysadmin to do it): We had an old, highly ranked .co.uk domain name. We had the same .com domain redirecting to the .co.uk. We decided to swap. So now the .com is the main domain. The old .co.uk is set as a 301 redirect to the .com. Our PR before for the .co.uk was 4. Our PR now for the .com is 1. None of our internal pages have pagerank. Our search engine positions dropped. We're coming up to two months in now. I found this on 301 redirects and it suggests it take up to 2 months. Backlinks all are still the same. Are we likely to get back the same "juice" as we did before on this domain?
It's always a risky thing to do. What Google wants to avoid is people buying old domains that had links and simply redirecting the link juice to an unrelated domain through 301'ing. They do understand though that there sometimes is a need for webmasters to move to a new domain and redirect the juice. What Google's algorithms have to decide is whether you're "just moving to another domain" or trying to manipulate rankings by buying old domains and redirecting juice. I don't work at Google so I can't really comment on the likelihood you'll get it back to before. But here's 2 things that I suggest might help: 1) Make sure the content on the .com domain is exactly the same as what it was on the .co.uk (this was probably the case already) 2) Try contacting those who linked to your .co.uk domain and get them to link to the .com version. Hopefully when google see's some of the links changing it can see the update is genuine and thus redirect the juice from all previous links. 3) Wait it out longer and see what happens. I'm afraid that's all the advice I can offer . If I'd been there at the time of the change I would have advised against it.
Actually it will take anywhere from 1 to 2 full updates possibly longer for all of the reindexing and rescoring that will be needed. You lost the PR 4 when you moved to the .com and lost the value of the links pointing to .co.uk Google cannot stop anyone from buying old domains and using the link juice. There is no way to do so using the algorithm, and as such filtering this method would be nearly impossible. I would advise to make any moves needed ,whenever needed. A business it built for years, decades and more .... to not take action is inaction and ineffective!
I beg to differ. If google has a record of a websites being about dogs and then see's on it's next crawl that it has been redirected to a site about chess. It's rather obvious that links to the dog domain should not be counted as votes for the chess site.
I think I am pretty sure how Google works. My statement was Google cannot stop anyone algorithmically from buying old domains and repurposing them. That Google will filter out irrelevant links is a given.
Sem-Advance is absolutely right on this issue. Let me try to break down how Google's PR works. example. co.uk has PR of 4 example. com has PR of 0 .co.uk has a PR of 4 becuase of X number of links from pages linking (voting) for it. Not because of the content of the page. When you destroy .co.uk and just make a redirect to .com, every link that was pointing to .co.uk now becomes useless. Therefore you lost all your votes. You will retain some votes to .co.uk which in turn .co.uk passes on to .com but the strength of those votes is greatly reduced. As Sem-Advanced rightfully says, it will take several updates for reindexing andd rescoring and you will never regain the full PR you had before you did what you did. Sorry for the bad news and good luck.
Thanks for the feedback guys. The change was calculated. It wasn't something thought about lighthearted. Two reasons: 1) The evidence that .com is weighted better over .co.uk. 2) We are moving into a worldwide market (we were just .co.uk before) 3) Better do the change and take the hit, rather than procrastinate To add: 1) The content is exactly the same 2) I've got 99% of the links changed to the .com. Incidently our search engine positions have hardly plummeted. They just aren't as good as they were before. We've worked very hard to put together good, original natural content, so I really hope that in another couple of updates we'll get back what we worked so hard for.
But when we do linkurdomain.com all those links we had before from the .co.uk's are staying. Is it not relevant that the .com used to be parked onto the .co.uk, and all they've done is swap?
I have been through almost exactly this problem in recent months. The change happened in April but only in the past month have we seen things smooth out. Double and triple check that every last slice of content on the old domain is properly 301'd to the new one. It's easy to end up with the odd page here and there that still presents to Google under the first domain, which confuses G by apparently presenting duplicate content. Scour every inch of Google webmasters tools for both the .co.uk and the .com and look for anything out of place. In particular look for duplicate content - that is, the same content that is capable of being accessed via more than oe unique URL, that is not properly 301 redirected. Do not assume that the 301 redirect you - or your techies - have set up is properly implemented. Try and get as many of the current backlinks changed to point to the .com - this worked very well for us. Add new content as that will help differentiate the old .co.uk content from the .com content.