Website Disappeared after Domain Change !

by 8 replies
9
Hi
Recently I bought an older domain for my website, I searched some tips on Google to find ' How to Change a domain without Losing Ranking ', the answer was I have to
301-redirect the domain1.com to the new domain2.com (and that's what I did),

next add domain2.com to webmaster tools,

then tell google through webmaster tools that you did change the domain.

Now 3-4 days passed and I don't find the domain1 neither the domain2 in Google for past already ranked keywords (even if I search "domain1.com" or "domain2.com"). Thus I lost visitors...


Is there anything I need to do !?
#search engine optimization #change #disappeared #domain #website
  • A 301 redirect will only pass a percentage of the authority of the pages, so depending on the level of competition you are likely to lose some rankings.

    Also, you should not redirect the entire domain to the new domain. You need to 301 redirect every single page individually to the corresponding new page.

    Even after that, it is not unusual to disappear from the SERPs for a few days while Google figures it all out.
    • [1] reply
    • Yes, that's what I did, a 301 redirect using domain forwarding of the registrar. In other words, domain1.com/page.html leads directly to domain2.com/page.html

      I'm a little worried about the rankings I achieved since a year of working...
      I hope this problem gets fixed soon...
      • [1] reply
  • Google will take its sweet time and we are not talking about days but weeks to months for the whole site to move if you have a lot of pages.

    I redirected my domain from just www to the non-www version and it took months for all pages to show up the non-www version in SER even after i did the htaccess and google wmt right. So talking about a whole domain change, i think that ought to take more time than 3-4 days.

    By the way, i hope when you say
    You don't mean just doing it from your registrar (godaddy etc) control panel and setting up a forwarder. You actually have to put up a htaccess file on your old domain that will 301 redirect to new domain, that is the only way google will receive the 301 message.
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    Website Disappeared after Domain Change !

    Hi Recently I bought an older domain for my website, I searched some tips on Google to find ' How to Change a domain without Losing Ranking ', the answer was I have to 301-redirect the domain1.com to the new domain2.com (and that's what I did),