How changing my domain name brought back rankings.

[AlanMosley]

First I would not recommend doing this to anyone else, but my circumstances were extreme.
Let me explain to those that did not read previous posts on the subject. I had a domain thatsit.net.au, I had never really promoted it as I used a keyword domain to rank in search engines but kept this domain mainly for email, but having said that it did rank ok considering, it ranked first for my business name at least.
A few moths back I decided to promote it and check the rankings, I was surprised to see that it ranked last for almost every thing,. Even my business name. Let me impress when I say last I mean in most cases absolute last and if not last very, very close to last.
I decided to get some links happening to move it of bottom, in my experiences a site that ranks that bad even a few links with show a big jump in rankings, it is easier to get from page 1000 to page 900 than it is to get from page 2 to page 1. The site had about 200 links and I pushed that up to about 1,000 but I was still at the bottom even for long tails searches where I was the only exact match on the internet.
asking for advice I got responses like you need better links and the such, this did not account for the sudden drop in rankings, as I knew the history I knew that thee was something deeper going on, I asked Google for reconsideration they said there was no manual action taken.
I should also mention I ranked very well in Bing all this time and still do.
By now I was getting paranoid that someone was stuffing me up somehow as a last resort I changed the domain name from thatsit.net.au to thatsit.com.au I did this about 10 days ago.
Today I searched for my company name and I came up #4 not bad from not being in the top 1,000 a few days ago.
Rankings are not where they used to be but I can handle that, I have 301’ed across all my links and have stated to change over the links I control, but as I still don’t know why the other domain would not move from the bottom as search results I am nervous that I may 301 over the problem.
I have never really done anything in the way of Black Hat SEO that would get me banned, maybe a bit of light grey over the years but nothing to worry about.
Anyhow I am non the wiser as to why things happened like they did. But I did want to report back to others that read the posts and thought that maybe I was imaging things.
I was never really depended on the domain ranking, what really bothers me is not knowing why the .net.au domain fell from rankiings and I still don’t know why.

[irvingw]

Thanks for sharing the experience.

I see see a bunch of .net.au subdomain pages still live and indexed by the way

https://www.google.com/#q=site:thatsit.net.au&hl=en&prmd=imvns&ei=xeiyTpnIJ5HKrAfu_MHwAw&start=0&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=d946ad29fde44088&biw=1920&bih=888

[AlanMosley]

Yes i will get rid of them, nothing much worth while. a bunch of forgotten ideas and experiments