Hi, I have recently changed my domain name and did what google says is best (including 301 redirects, etc) to keep my pagerank, but this change has dramatically affected my position in google, I used to be on the 1st position for the relevant keywords, but now I'm on page 5 (position 49. or so), it has passed 1 month since the change and it doesn't seem to be getting better.. my position on bing didn't change, but it seems I have dissapeared from yahoo. Anyway google is what matters, so I'm pretty desperate I did have the important keyword in my domain name before, which I don't have now, it seems like it matters much, is it so ??
In short, yes, keywords in domains can make a big difference, as can all of the backlinks that are pointing to your old domain.
yes, but if there are really a LOT of backlinks pointing to the old domain, I can't just go and ask everyone to change the link, most of them can't be reached anyway and probably a lot of them would just ignore the request, so the only way to fix this is to just go from the start, getting new backlinks ?
Your decision, I'm afraid. You can sweat it out and see if the rankings come back in a few months or you can revert to the old domain and build a new site in the same niche with the new one.
Domain Age is very big factor counted in PAGE RANK and SERP positions. and with the change of domain name the age also has been changes which have affected the PR of your website.
hm.. what exactly do you mean by age of the domain, the new domain is actually not so NEW, i bought it from someone actually, it has been registered few years ago, but wasn't really used I guess you mean, as google is concerned, the domain started aging when I did 301 and moved my site to this new domain ? if that's so, how many months pass on average until google starts treating the new domain as the old one ? Do you think the key thing here is to keep the old domain for at least 180 days as google suggests ?
Even Matt Cutts was found scratching his head, when asked this question Eric Enge. Though the main topic over there was decaying of page rank on 301 redirections, but it still definitely throws some light on this factor as well. As per my knowledge, I guess, there could be two factors involved here, 1. Its just one month since you made the redirections right? So lets give some time to the bot, to finish its update. Once all the backlinks pointing towards your old domain is crawled, you might see the change and get back your old rank. Though its a bit tough to retrieve the old rank, once its lost. But still you can wait for a month or so. 2. The new domain doesn't have the all important keyphrases in its URL, right? thats one concerning factor. If your old domain was really stuffed with key phrases, then there's every possiblity that the ranking was highly influenced by the keyword rich url. Now in such cases, we have noticed that, this overdependency could cost dearly once the keywords are removed, be it from the url, or from the title tags. So if that is the case, then am afraid my friend, you have to start it all over again from the scratch.
Yes, I strongly agree with you, domain age is one of the mail factor for ranking and PR. when you change the domain your domain age also has been changed thatswhy your ranking dropped down in SERPs. Dear, i thing you did a big mistake...
Agreed. Also, by using permanent 301 redirect does not mean all the PR will be passed on to the new domain but only a good portion. Asking for link update can help as well as gathering of new quality and authoritative backlinks.
yeah, it's been a little more than a month, I'm gonna wait more, in the meantime maybe try getting more backlinks it wasn't really stuffed and the old and new domain differ only in one word (there are 3 words total), but it is the most important one I actually have a lot of good/strong backlinks pointing to the old domain, that must be a good thing
You just need to wait on Google to re-crawl ALL of your inbound links and recalculate your rankings. This can take from several weeks to a few months, depending on the source of your links and how many there are. PR for example is a recursive algorithm which takes multiple crawls to calculate because the link graph contains cycles (i.e. A can link to B which can link to C which might link back to A). You did the correct thing by 301 redirecting your URLs. Hopefully you did this on a page-by-page basis and did NOT simply redirect ALL old URLs to your new home page. THAT would be disasterous. The Eric Enge interview revealed nothing new. We have known for years that there is a decay or loss of PR with each 301 redirect. It's just the first time that I've seen Cutts actually admit it. If you think about it, the slight PR loss due to 301 redirects makes TOTAL sense. It's due to the damping or decay factor in the PR formula. In the original PR formula published in The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (as well as later patent documentation), Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin discuss PR in Section 2. This document actually became the blueprint for Google. They describe the damping factor D as part of the PR formula. So for example if the damping factor is 15% and the page has 100 PR points with 10 outbound links, the outbound links do NOT get 10 points each as many think. Only 85% of the 100 PR points are passed out on the page's outbound links because 15% (the damping/decay factor) are thrown away. So each outbound link gets 8.5 PR points in this example. Well, if you think about what a 301 redirect is... it is essentially changing the page at the old redirected URL so that it has 1 outbound link pointing to the new target URL. So if the old page had 100 PR points and the damping factor is set to 15% then only 85 PR points (not 100) will be passed to the target of the redirect. The drop in rankings likely has very little to do with your old domain name having a keyword in it. Google never really gave boosts because of the domain name unless it was an EXACT match for the keyword phrase in question. So at most, I domain name typically only helps for one search phrase - the exact match. I have seen a LOT of people complaining about this since Caffeine went live. It seems that even changes to things like page templates (like moving the navigation from the top of the page to the side of the page and visa versa) are causing rankings to drop dramatically and not come back for long periods of times. If it were me I would wait it out... Give it a couple more months... And continue to build links directly to the new domain URLs.
I did it page-by-page offcourse yeah, I decided to wait more, I also did some link building lately and today I'm on page 2 on google which is a great improvement! (it was page 5 yesterday), I just hope it ain't temporary and will continue to go up So I guess that's it, thank you all for the useful info, especially Canonical, I feel a little bit wiser now!