Domain change recommendations

[gouldtr]

We recently migrated one of our websites to a new domain. Obviously we were expecting a decrease in traffic initially, but it has actually gone down by 70% week-over-week since we made the switch.

We set up a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain, changed all internal links to the new domain and changed all inbound links that we owned to the new domain.

Our research suggested the best way to approach a domain change was by keeping it simple and not making too many changes at once. So my questions are:

1. Are these the kinds of results we should expect initially after a domain change? And if not,

2. What are the steps we should take from here?

Thanks!

[CommT]

Have you done change of address in Webmaster Tools? You need access to both the new and the old domain to do it, but it's very simple. I did a similar thing (switch domains) in April and did the change of address and didn't lose traffic. Maybe this is why?

Also, make sure your new pages have canonicals just in case you forgot a 301.

Talking of 301s - I assume you did page to page, not simply domain to domain? It's a boring job mapping the old to new urls, but worth it.

Good luck,

Amelia

PS - there was a moz video about this which I watched before doing my domain transfer, I can't find it today but maybe someone at Moz will be able to point you in the right direction?

[WilliamKammer]

Make sure the 301s you put in place are functioning properly. Did you 301 all pages from the old site to the new one? Did you redirect them at a page-level or just grab all the old URLs and redirect them all to the new root domain?

Also, look at analytics and GMT for the old and the new domain. Do the increases on the new domain correspond with the drops from the old domain? Maybe there some spots on the old domain that are still there and need to be redirected? The data in these spots should help you determine if something is out of whack.

How long ago was the domain change? This kind of drop can be expected for a couple weeks, but too much longer than that, and something else may be wrong.

[gouldtr]

Thanks William, and yes we did redirects at the page level.

It looks like we didn't have the correct analytics code in a few different templates so that might have been the cause of some of the drop. It's also been just over a week since we made the switch so we're probably still in that window were the drop should be expected.