31 replies to this topic

[rolf]

HI all, I have a worrying trend on my stats and was hoping for some ideas and second opinions.

We had a site that, largely thanks to things I learned here, was search engine friendly and had lots of original content and was doing quite well. Every month we'd see about 10% more traffic than the month before and got to about 3500 unique visitors per month, mostly from search.

The site was started to simply support our eBay sales and things were working well. Sales were coming in from the site as well as ebay and we made the decision that our-generic-ebay-id.com was very unprofessional sounding so we bought our-company-name.com.

After setting up a revamped version of the site on the new domain we set up 301 redirects on the old site and all seemed ok, much of the search engine traffic was going to the old domain and redirected but the new domain was getting some traffic too.

Over the first couple of months (April and May) there was a neglegable drop in traffic but I put this down to the weather heating up - we do seem to be affected with a summer slow down so I wasn't worried.

Unfortunately this trend has continued month on month and the last few weeks we've seen a significant drop in traffic, to the point where it looks like this month might bring less than 500 visitors from the engines :-(

Although the design has changed somewhat, the new design 'should' actually be more search friendly so I don't think this is the cause. All of the old content is still there with new content added regularly, so I just don't get why the drop.

Any ideas?

[chrishirst]

just read the [url=http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=12535]aging delay thread[/url]

new domain = aging delay

[rolf]

Thanks Chris, I'd heard a bit about it but that's by far the clearest explanation I've read.

So would it have been better to have kept the site where it was and set the new domain up as an 'about our company' type site for a while until it aged?

If so, would it benefit me to move the site back to the old domain for a few months or am I chasing shadows with that?

[torka]

If the old site was well indexed and ranked, you might want to check Scottie's article on the use of a 302 redirect to end-run the aging delay for a "replacement" domain such as yours (I believe there's a link in the second article in the [url=http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=12535]aging delay thread[/url]).

I know Google has gone through a couple of updates since then, so there's no guarantee that things still work exactly as they did when the article was written. But it might be worth at least experimenting to see if that will do the trick for you.

--Torka

[rolf]

Thanks Torka, I couldn't find the article about 302 redirects but I googled it and found a load of good info.

There seems to be a bit of controversy about 302s, I can see the logic but I'm not sure if it's the way to go. One thing I read was an article about Business.com, who apparently incorrectly used a 302 to redirect and got penalized for it - had the writer got the wrong end of the stick?

As the site has permanently moved to a new home, would I not be gaming the engines by using a 302 instead of a 301?

[torka]

Here's a direct link to scottie's article: http://www.highranki...ue142.htm#guest

HTH!

Not familiar with the Business.com article, so I can't comment on that one...

--Torka

[Jill]

As the site has permanently moved to a new home, would I not be gaming the engines by using a 302 instead of a 301?

No.

[rolf]

Thanks, great article. I've made the change to my htaccess file so will wait and see what happens.

[train99]

I took a few pages off an existing domain, bought a new domain and moved them over. Then placed 301 permanant redirects on the first domain.

These pages were both in the #2 slot on google for my fairly uncompetitive keywords. Five days later google had updated the results to point to the new domains.

Today- 10 days later - the one is #3, and google is starting to return results for the other pages on the site.

The pages were removed from the first domain 6 weeks ago, and blank place holders put up. Even the blank place holders held the search results, which I assume is from the inbound links.

I don't know whether this points at a work around, or if I'll lose the rankings and go into the age delay. Only time will tell.

From experience, my new sites since the age delay filter was added mostly seem to get included in spite of the filter. The sites that go bink and have dozens of pages get slammed. The sites that only have a few pages and then slowly grow with a page or two a week don't get filtered out. That could be a part of the filter. I think the filter was added to block huge scraper sites. Building the site slowly might be a way to get past the filter. Then again, I don't have any ads on the sites other than text links to other sites.

Terry

PS to ROLF - what do you sell on eBay? are you using a blog to promote your auctions? I am looking for people who do a good job of promoting their auctions with websites and blogs.

[Jill]

fairly uncompetitive keywords

From experience, my new sites since the age delay filter was added mostly seem to get included in spite of the filter.

That's because the aging delay only affects fairly competitive phrases.

[qwerty]

How competitive is fairly competitive, by the way? I published a small site the last week of July and set up a Google sitemap. So far, Google has indexed only the home page, and Yahoo and MSN haven't found anything. As far as I know, there are no sites linking to it yet, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out my client has gotten it listed in a few places. This is their third site, so they've been through this before.

Google has it at #1 out of 542,000 for a search on the first three words of the home page's title, and #22 of 393,000 for three words from the title, but don't appear in a single string. Obviously, these aren't highly competitive searches. The same searches in quotes return 9 and 0 respectively. But in my experience, the best you can hope for with a new site is to rank for the company name and maybe some unique string of text.

[train99]

From what Jill said about uncompetitive terms not tripping the filter seems to say I've walked blindly into a good system.

I always build my sites around uncompetitive terms then add more competitive terms later.

My Seo skills aren't great, but I get quite a bit of traffic from the uncompetitive terms.

The site I built last week has already got people posting in my comments section, so as time goes by should be a good site.

Most of what I've learned I learned here.

Everytime I think about this I kick myself for delaying the rebuild of a big site I built 6-8 years ago and abandoned. That site was ranking well, and now has fallen off as a result of neglect.

Terry

[train99]

Bob,
This is a one word keyword phrase. Google has me at #2 of about 97,600 results. Yahoo has me at #10 of 97,800. However, most of those results are copycat pages of people chasing affiliate commissions. My page is a long negative review so content wise it's more attractive.

Using the Wordtracker results I have top ten results for four of the top five search variations using the word on both Yahoo and Google. MSN is moving all over since I built the new site.

Not bad for an hours work. I hope they stick.

Terry

[Jill]

From what Jill said about uncompetitive terms not tripping the filter seems to say I've walked blindly into a good system.

Yep!

[rolf]

Interesting stuff indeed, no noticeable effect from changing to a 302 yet but it's only been a couple of days so far. I'll keep monitoring it and post anything worthy of a mention.

Terry - we sell cat products, have a look at my sig for all the info (resisting getting into self promotion mode here ). I'm not a blogger anyway so I can't help you on that one.

I kind of look at eBay as a disaster waiting to happen these days (See what's happening to AOL at the moment?) so my focus is now on using auctions to promote the website, rather than the other way round.