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.
The original post has received a few comments, so for those that are interested I thought I’d post a follow up of where we are now seven months later. I would say it took about five months for traffic to return to the pre-change levels that they were. Here’s a list of some of the things I had to do to get things back going again.
- Chase up as many of the old backlinks that I could and ask the site owners to change their links to point to the new URL’s. Most webmasters were very helpful and happy to change their links.
- Get the links changed in DMOZ: I think this was a critical move, the actual directory change was made much quicker than I’d have expected and the effect on Google rankings seemed to be almost instant.
- Buy some new paid links and adverts: I did spend some money on a few quality links back to the new site, and I also run an advertising program through stumbleupon which seemed to help a little.
- Get out a press release: The first thing I did with the new site was pay to have a professional written press release and use some pr websites to get it out there. I won’t go into huge details here as I think this probably warrants an article all of its own, so stay tuned for that one.
- Creating a site map: I created an automatic XML site map in asp.net that was always up to date. I submitted this to all the major search engines that currently accept site maps.
- Social Bookmarking and Community Sites: I registered with many of these and made sure my site was listed on the page somewhere, Stumbleupon, Digg, MySpace, Squidoo, any I could find.
- Promote, Promote and Promote: I just kept plugging away anywhere I could think of, discussing the change in forums and including backlinks, talking about my experience on other blogs. Anywhere that I could justify talking about the site, without looking spammy I did.
So I hope this helps anyone who’s thinking about a domain name change or just going through the process now. If I can offer two Google tools that really helped me, they are the Google Webmaster site, and Google Analytics.
The webmaster site allows you to see everything that Google knows about your site, what pages it has indexed, how often it spiders them and what backlinks each page has. Forget about waiting months to see what your page rank will be, see the real time ranking of every one of your pages now.
Also Google Analytics is a great free traffic analysis software that gives details information, on who visits, what they looked at, where they came from and how long they stayed. I know I sound like an advert for Google right now, but really these two tools were vital for me to get back to where I once was.
Good luck with it.
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.
