301 Redirect with an Exact Domain name Match

[TrevorMcKendrick]

My Client had a site that ranked for a pretty competitive two word phrase, but for a variety of reasons had to transfer the site to a different domain name (with none of the previous keywords). We've 301'd everything just fine to the new site, but our traffic for that two word phrase, as well as related long tail traffic, is beginning to drop.

Could the drop be related to something that we didn't do well in the transfer? Or is it due to the new domain name now not being an exact match?

Sitenote question: Our Google Analytics is still set up for the former domain name and shows data just fine. Is there any reason to switch GA to the new domain? What are the pros/cons?

Much thanks in advance!

[jkundrotas]

" Our Google Analytics is still set up for the former domain name and shows data just fine"

How do You get your new domain traffic data?

[YannickVeys]

Can you explain a bit more about how you did the redirecting? What did you redirect? And how did you do it? So: what url's, based on what assumptions/facts/numbers to what url's did you redirect to.

I don't think there is any reason why you should change the analytics to the new domain.

[YannickVeys]

Leave the old code?

[TrevorMcKendrick]

We look at the old domain's Google Analytic account. All traffic to the new domain is shown there.

[TrevorMcKendrick]

Say, if the old domain was xyz.com, and the new one is abc.com, we 301 redirected every url from the old site to the new. So for example, xyz.com/post1 now redirects to abc.com/post1.

Does that help?

[YannickVeys]

That helps. So you redirected every url to the matching url on the new domain? Good!

That's all you could've done. Now the problem is: the new domain is new, hasn't built up long time value and probably all the links that are pointing to the old domain, haven't been spidered yet to be redirected to your new domain. That's problem one.

Problem two is a bigger one: all your links are now devalued because they are all being redirected to your new domain.

I'd try to find the low hanging fruit and e-mail them to change the link to the new site and preferrably not to the homepage, but to different pages on you site.