I have a dvd review site that has been running in one format or another since the year 2000. The site itself was reasonably successful and made a fair profit at times. Back in the summer of last year the core team on the site decided that we needed to expand in order to future proof the site. DVD as a format probably now has a limited lifespan and we wanted to expand into other areas such as games, music and the new HD formats for movies.
We all agreed that the domain name needed to change as the name was very DVD specific. The site was called dvdlard.co.uk (don’t ask it’s a long story 
). So we agreed that when the site was launched we would change the domain name to reflect the change. So the site was now to be called www.digitallard.com.
I was well aware that such a change could have a big impact on traffic, search engine hits etc. so I tried to do everything I could to minimise the hit. I arranged every single page off the old url to redirect to the new site, and I also set the redirects up with proper 301 error messages so that the search engines would know that the pages have moved somewhere else.
I also started going through all of the back links and trying to get those sites to update those links including DMOZ (still pending). To try and boost things along I also had a press release written which I distributed through the likes of PRWeb. I also ensured all the tools were in place like a google site map, rss feeds etc.
Despite all of these things, the change has had a devastating result on traffic. The site has been running for about one month now and traffic is at it’s lowest in years. I can see that the search engines know about all of the site pages but they are all ranking very low indeed. Income is at an all time low too and I think I may have to start doing some adwords promotion to try and bring people in.
Things are improving very slowly and I do believe that things will return to normal, but the one lesson I’ve learned from all of this is to not underestimate the impact of changing a domain name as it’s had a major impact for me. If anyone reading this has experience of this and has any tips, please feel free to comment it would be more than welcome.
My blog is mainly about programming in .Net 2, website promotion and affiliate marketing although I do have the odd ramble on about anything that comes to mind.
July 22nd, 2007 at 1:54 am
Hi Steve, and thanks for the warning. We’re contemplating making a domain name change as well, and I was curious what your situation is now, 5-6 months after you made the change?
July 22nd, 2007 at 4:39 am
Hi Bjorn,
Now the situation is much better, but it did need a lot of link building work to get it back to the old traffic levels, and only very recently has it really started to show through. The one thing that really seemed to help was getting the links changed in the DMOZ open directory.
Good luck with your domain change.
July 22nd, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Thanks a bunch, that’s comforting to know
One of the reasons we want to do the domain name change is to get subdomains so that we get more entries in DMOZ; we’ve got a site which is really per-city so we’d like to be able to submit one entry for each city, but that’s not possible with just one domain name.
Since DMOZ is so important, I hope having many DMOZ entries will help on the total PageRank for all the sub-sites. :-/
July 24th, 2007 at 4:45 am
Good lucking getting all those sub domains into DMOZ, it took a long time to get my original site in there and that was a few years ago. I did read a tip once that if you really want to get into a particular category for DMOZ, the quickest way is to offer to moderate that category for a while.
August 6th, 2007 at 9:13 am
Hello,
I needed to make some company internal changes. For this reason I moved my old website domain http://www.pixel-storefront.com to a new domain http://www.pixel-templates.com. My domain http://www.pixel-storefront.com has a Pagerank = 4. I have made the domain transfer 8 weeks ago. After 2 months, my Pagerank for http://www.pixel-templates.com is still = 0.
I have made all the necessary 301 redirects and all other Google suggested do’s and dont’s.
How long will it take, until the pagerank = 4 will be transfered to my new domain http://www.pixel-templates.com? Has anyone out there made similar experiences? Do I get punished now by Google simply because of the fact that I needed to re-structure my company and website projects?
graphically & sincerely,
Marc Klein
mediaVinci - The art of invention
August 6th, 2007 at 9:31 am
It took me about five months to really finally see the pagerank change in Google. Google does an update roughly every quarter and the first quarter mine did not get updated, so when the next one came around the rank was updated.
However that does not mean Google has not transferred the page rank because it is something that happens every day, it’s just the counter that’s updated quarterly. I would suggest that if you haven’t already done so, you should register for good webmaster tools here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/ then you can see what google is really doing with your site.
Hope this helps.
August 6th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
[...] A while back I posted an article of my experiences of changing domain names for a site. I basically spoke of the devastating effect the change had made to the traffic the site was receiving and it’s ranking in Google. I won’t go back into great detail here, for the whole story it’s probably best to read the original post. [...]
September 14th, 2007 at 5:45 am
[...] A while back I posted an article of my experiences of changing domain names for a site. I basically spoke of the devastating effect the change had made to the traffic the site was receiving and it’s ranking in Google. I won’t go back into great detail here, for the whole story it’s probably best to read the original post. [...]
September 18th, 2007 at 10:05 am
7665376fd0ad47431a2245d553fa3f60
—Hello
Very interesting information! Thanks!
Bye