Ranking dropped after domain change

[domiji]

Dear Moz Community,

first of all excuse my bad english, i am from europe and my english is not the best
I use Moz Analytics for several days and try to figure out why our "main keyword" totally dropped after our domain change.

We started this year with a new company name and a new domain. Our old domain was dp-hochzeitsfotograf.de and the main keyword we try to rank for was "hochzeitsfotograf" which means "wedding photographer" here in Germany. Last summer we reached position 1 and short before our domain change we still ranked on position 6.

We register the domain change in google webmaster tools and redirect all urls via 301 redirect to the new domain. Our new domain name is yourheyday.de and all rankings adopted pretty good except our main keyword (now position 62) which could break our neck the next few month.

I would be so so happy and really appreciate if anyone of you have an advise for us.

Thanks and many greetings from europe
Dominik

[dotfly]

Hi Dominik,

although I am german too, this community is in english. So you will have to cope with my english as well

Your new domain will profit from the 301 redirect and this will have an impact on your rankings as well. As you described the results are already visible. Unfortunately there is no one and only reason why you still haven`t caught up with the ranking for the keyword "hochzeitsfotograf". I personally guess, that your old domain name had a bonus beacuse it was a PMD (partial match domain). So your old domain included this keyword and this was a bit more relevant for Google.

On the other hand there are many, many ranking factors which have an influence on your rankings. So I would never tell you that waht I`ve described is the problem/reason! The only thing you can do now is continue creating unque content that is closely connect to your keyword. Show relevance for this term and this will help you (together with some more patience) that your ranking for "hochzeitsfotograf" will increase.

I am sorry that this isn`t any direct help for you which can fix your issue right away!

[GPainter]

There is always some loss when moving and it can take some time to recover, there is some helpful things here -

http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic

Have you given enough time for rankings to bounce back? There can be some minor loss when moving but it can be countered with some fresh links to go with the fresh site.

Have you change the structure what I mean by this is the page that was ranking in pos.1 is it very different from the page you have now as changes in content etc. can have effects.

Hope some of that helps a bit as i bet this is very frustrating.

Good luck!

[domiji]

Hi Marc, hi Chris,

thanks for your help and your comments. I think you are right and i have to concentrate on new unique content. Maybe the ranking will come back. But it is just frustrating at the moment.

Thanks again and many greetings
Dominik

[billhartzer]

Dominik, whenever you change URLs (domain names) from one to another, there are going to be issues that come up like this. When you redirect one domain name to another you pass on all of the history, links, and soforth to the new domain name.

When you redirected the old domain name to the new one you combined the links of both domain names. And the new domain name could have a link profile that is not very good (or that was worse than the old domain name). I would take a look at all of the links of both domain names and perform a link audit to make sure that there aren't any links that you need to get removed or cleaned up.