Site move and rebrand catastrophe
OK, so here goes.
I had a website that was over a decade old. I moved to another town so I decided to re-brand the business and start a fresh with a new name relevant to my new town and a new domain.
Built the new website which was is many ways similar to the previous one, but more expansive in the services and overall better.
Performed a Google change of address and did everything properly to redirect and match urls where possible. I work as a web designer and SEO and have done this for clients before. With 10+ years of SEO and web design experience, when I say I know what I am doing I really do.
However, this process has been catastrophic to both my business and me personally. 6 months on and Google still have not processed the domain move. Some pages on the new website still have not even be indexed. The new website had almost zero traffic and no rankings for at least 4 months, and almost 6 months to the day after initiating the change of address the website has lost almost all the rankings it did have.
Google has done nothing but penalise the new website from day one. I wrote 90% of the content myself, and used Ai to finish things off. I have conducted a myriad of competitor analysis local to my area and my website is better designed, has better content and a better backlink profile than pretty much everyone I am competing against.
I can categorically say after looking at those urls ranking higher than mine across multiple services that it is not my content, it is not my page speed, it is not my backlinks, it is not my on-page seo, it is not any of these things causing the problems.
For example; a website with 1500+ words of overly spammy content operating from Texas USA is ranking higher than my website in my niche in Wales UK. Google is a joke.
Another example; A small website a with a few pages and 2 backlinks to the whole website is also ranking higher than me for a certain keyword even though that keyword is mentioned only once on a page with 150 words of content that is essentially garbage. My page fully explains the service, uniquely, and in detail.
So if Google is prepared to rank spammy content above mine how can my content be penalised? If Google is prepared to rank thin, weak content above mine with no backlinks how am I supposed to figure what has gone wrong? Especially when both these are true at the same time.
Some new pages have gone straight to position 1 or page 1 only for them to then vanish from Google and not be re-indexed even when they have been updated and the content made better still.
About 3 months in when things were driving me nuts I added the non www and http properties to the search console after someone suggested it might help, and it did result in a hundred or so impressions but still no traffic or rankings.
Now, after almost 7 months the old domain is still in Google and jumps from 30 pages being indexed to 70+ pages and back to another number of pages seemingly at random, daily. Also the new domain jumps around in the number of indexed pages up to 270+ randomly and daily even though it is only a 145 pages in total.
But here I am, almost bankrupt and the impressions have now fallen off a cliff. After requesting re-indexing of updated pages Google still isn't doing so 4 weeks later. I have no idea why a simple re-brand and domain change for a website with about 50 pages could literally ruin my life, but here we are.
Suggestions on next steps please?
I had a website that was over a decade old. I moved to another town so I decided to re-brand the business and start a fresh with a new name relevant to my new town and a new domain.
Built the new website which was is many ways similar to the previous one, but more expansive in the services and overall better.
Performed a Google change of address and did everything properly to redirect and match urls where possible. I work as a web designer and SEO and have done this for clients before. With 10+ years of SEO and web design experience, when I say I know what I am doing I really do.
However, this process has been catastrophic to both my business and me personally. 6 months on and Google still have not processed the domain move. Some pages on the new website still have not even be indexed. The new website had almost zero traffic and no rankings for at least 4 months, and almost 6 months to the day after initiating the change of address the website has lost almost all the rankings it did have.
Google has done nothing but penalise the new website from day one. I wrote 90% of the content myself, and used Ai to finish things off. I have conducted a myriad of competitor analysis local to my area and my website is better designed, has better content and a better backlink profile than pretty much everyone I am competing against.
I can categorically say after looking at those urls ranking higher than mine across multiple services that it is not my content, it is not my page speed, it is not my backlinks, it is not my on-page seo, it is not any of these things causing the problems.
For example; a website with 1500+ words of overly spammy content operating from Texas USA is ranking higher than my website in my niche in Wales UK. Google is a joke.
Another example; A small website a with a few pages and 2 backlinks to the whole website is also ranking higher than me for a certain keyword even though that keyword is mentioned only once on a page with 150 words of content that is essentially garbage. My page fully explains the service, uniquely, and in detail.
So if Google is prepared to rank spammy content above mine how can my content be penalised? If Google is prepared to rank thin, weak content above mine with no backlinks how am I supposed to figure what has gone wrong? Especially when both these are true at the same time.
Some new pages have gone straight to position 1 or page 1 only for them to then vanish from Google and not be re-indexed even when they have been updated and the content made better still.
About 3 months in when things were driving me nuts I added the non www and http properties to the search console after someone suggested it might help, and it did result in a hundred or so impressions but still no traffic or rankings.
Now, after almost 7 months the old domain is still in Google and jumps from 30 pages being indexed to 70+ pages and back to another number of pages seemingly at random, daily. Also the new domain jumps around in the number of indexed pages up to 270+ randomly and daily even though it is only a 145 pages in total.
But here I am, almost bankrupt and the impressions have now fallen off a cliff. After requesting re-indexing of updated pages Google still isn't doing so 4 weeks later. I have no idea why a simple re-brand and domain change for a website with about 50 pages could literally ruin my life, but here we are.
Suggestions on next steps please?
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