I've seen many blogs changing their domain and successfully coming back in all aspects. But in my case, everything went wrong It was last month when I decided to change my domain name to establish a better brand and to improve the relevancy of the domain name. mextena.com > beginnerblogtips.com Stats when I left mextena.com: Alexa Rank: 38k (now.. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mextena.com) Daily Uniques: 600 - 1000 Proof: http://img594.imageshack.us/img594/2449/proof1n.png (haven't cropped - not in a mood to open PS ) Daily Pageviews: 2000 - 3000 (Please Check last proof) PageRank: 3 (and.. more than 10 posts were also having PR3) Main SE Ranking Falls: Top 10 Antivirus - was: 1st page 3rd rank on Google.com | now: 1st page 9th rank on Google.com Blogging Tips - was: 1st page 2nd rank on Google.co.in | now: 1st page 6th rank on google.co.in Most Searched Topics - was: 1st page 3rd rank on Google.com | now: changing everytime.. 6th I think Condition of BeginnerBlogTips Alexa Rank: 274k (no bit increases) Daily Uniques: 300- 400 Proof: http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/2843/proof2z.png Daily PageViews: 1600 - 1700 PageRank: 0 (NP but its already the time for update and few of my blogs got it increased this week) What I did? - Moved SQL and files to the new domain location - 301 Redirect from mextena.com to beginnerblogtips.com - Replaced Internal Links So, What do you think? I want my Alexa, PR and Traffic back. Can you please help me by sharing some tips/suggestions.
Did you 301 redirect all requests for the old domain to the home page of the new domain? Or did you redirect each old URL to it's equivalent new URL? You will ALWAYS see a dip in rankings and traffic after implementing site-wide redirects. You have to wait on ALL of your inbound links to be recrawled. If you did page-by-page redirects, your rankings "should" return in a few weeks, maybe a couple months. But if you redirected all requests for the old site to the home page of the new site, you will likely have ruined your rankings because the link text of your old deep links won't likely match the content of your new home page.
Just to reiterate what social-media said, if you change domains, you are going to loose traffic. There is no way around it. You say that you have seen other sites do it and "coming back successfully"...of course they can and of course you can...the key being that they "came back". That's not to say that they didn't take an initial hit in traffic.
I'm wondering - if you were getting reasonable traffic from mextena.com why didn't you just create an entirely new site and build that as well?
Yeah, your website will definitely rebound eventually and you will just have to work a bit harder for a while to get it back to where it was
I agree with what has been said and it will definitely take a while to replace Alexa and PR. It doesn't look like you've actually taken too much of a hit for pageviews... How long ago did you make the switch? What are your biggest traffic sources?
Definitely follow through with what atxsurf says. Also, try to build high powered links to your new domain names and such so that the other links move over. It's funny how the changing of a destination URL will have a bad effect on the SEO ranking of your site much like how changing the destination URL on Google AdWords has a HUGE effect on ad quality score and ruins your budget. Try to keep URLs the same, I guess.