Changed domains and rankings dropped. Any ideas?

[barry]

Hey everyone,

We recently switched our site from pricebustersmd.com to pricebusters.com.

301's were put in place. We submitted a change of address notification in Google Search Console. Yext was updated to show the new domain in local listings. We did everything correctly from a technical point of view.

Still, we're seeing a drop in rankings and traffic (from both local pack and regular organic). Anyone have any suggestions about how to get back on track?

Thanks,
Barry

 

[djbaxter]

1. When did you make the change? How long has it been?

2. The old site correctly redirects for me using Firefox, but it is not directing to SSL/TSL, which I would expect for an ecommerce site. Was pricebustersmd.com SSL?

3. Attempting to answer question #2 above, I tried to connect to https://pricebustersmd.com - this did NOT redirect to the new domain and timed out with an error message:

The connection has timed out

The server at pricebustersmd.com is taking too long to respond.

• The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
• If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer’s network connection.
• If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

 

[Nikos]

Hi,

Ranking volatility is normal. It can take months to retain positions. Google needs to crawl, index and re-adjust ranking power of the webpages.

Thus, even if everything is correct from a technical view the site could still suffer.

A common mistake I see in site migrations is the lack of URL mapping and planning. Developers do not implement redirects one to one. In addition, when they do not know what to do with some URLs they either delete them (404) or they redirect them to the homepage (possible soft-404).

 

[JoshuaMackens]

If your rankings haven't returned in a month then I would say something is wrong.

djbaxter seems to be on the case though and has some good clues.