Loss of traffic due to domain move, not recovering

[cindyt-17038]

I have a new client who this year chose to eliminate using a "stronger", older domain (domain authority 50) for a newer, weaker domain (domain authority 38). The redirects actually started end of 2013 and happened over time by page/section. All were completed by Jan 12 2014.

While 301 redirects are in place, and the robots.txt is disallowing all (187 pages blocked), it looks as though Google is still indexing pages (149 indexed) although not sure why. Perhaps they should be removed from the server?

In spite of the redirects, they are not getting the (combined) traffic expected. Should they have had that expectation? Could it be because they are going from a "stronger", long established domain to a "weaker", newer domain, that it may take a long time to recover?

They recently had another agency review the links on the weaker domain and they submitted a file to Google to disavow the links they found to be "toxic" however it doesn't seem to have made any difference, yet. Any idea how long it "should" take to make a difference, if it will indeed make a difference?

They do have a blog in a sub-directory that doesn't get much traffic (approx 0.50% of the total traffic). Every post ends with a blatant self-promotion and due to Penguin, they have recently begun to mix up their link text and not include a link on every post.

Last their target audience is both B-B and B-C, with B-B being priority.

The big question I have is do you see changes take place with almost instant results in Google? Or am I right in telling him, this will take some time. He feels it's been almost 4 months now and their visibility/traffic should be more in par with what it was combined.

Something to note is that they were sort of competing with themselves by using both domains however the number of searchers probably hasn't changed much...

Thank you so much for giving me your 2 cents!
xo

[Vacatia_SEO]

This is all great information! Mozzers rule!

So I am in the process of recommending 301 redirects from a stronger domain (old but still getting a lot of traffic) to a weaker one (new, refreshed design, same product). No one is maintaing the old site and we want to pass the link juice. I am concerned that what happened to Cindy will happen to us. I want that traffic and I want to make sure that the 301 redirect will work. And of course, don't block old domain with robot.txt

One question though: What happens over time with the 301 redirect? I am assuming that the newer domain will eventually show in search results for the KWs that triggered the old domain to show. Is that a safe assumption?

[JaneCopland]

Hi Cindy,

Checking in to see if you removed the robots.txt blocking of the old URLs. When you put 301s in place, generally that is all that is needed to show Google that one URL has moved to another - blocking in robots.txt increases the likelihood that Google won't pick this up or ignore it. Blocking the old URLs tells Google to not access any of the information on the page (it doesn't actually tell Google not to index the URL, just to not read or index any of the content on the URL, hence why you sometimes see robots.txt-blocked URLs ranking, but with no cached information.

A 301 redirect is done by the server, not information on the page itself, but it's still inadvisable to block URLs you'd otherwise want crawled for their 301s this way.

Please also make sure someone noted domain change in Webmaster Tools as Donna says. You can do this in the WMT interface and it helps inform Google that the change was made in full, that it was deliberate and completed by the site's regular owner.

My money is on the robots.txt exclusion too -  changing from an older, stronger domain to one that is a little weaker should not hurt particularly if everything else is done right.

Best,

Jane

[DonnaDuncan]

As to your point about " it looks as though Google is still indexing pages... ", pull up a cached version of the old, still indexed, but redirected page. See if it is a cached version of the NEW page.

I know that was a confusing question. Let me try saying it a different way.

Type the site:strongolddomain.ext command and view the cached version of one of the pages shown as still being indexed. See if the message from Google laid over the top of the cached page says "This is Google's cache of http://www.weaknewdomain.ext" or if it says "This is Google's cache of http://www.strongolddomain.ext ", If it's weaknew then you know you don't have a problem. I've seen that happen before.

Hope that makes sense...

Did you also notify google of the domain change via webmaster tools?

[WilliamKammer]

Why block the pages in robots.txt after the redirects? That seems counter productive: you want Google to see that the pages are being redirected, but you are preventing Google from looking at the redirected page.

Remove the robots.txt block and you should be okay. Also, just for fun, confirm that they are 301 redirects and not 302s, but my money is on the robots.txt.

Four months is too long after a migration to not see a recovery.