Maintaining Rank During a Domain Change

[a_toohill]

Looking to the community for any insights on our situation.  We moved a decently ranked domain name that was ranking between 3rd-6th in organic search results to a new domain that we thought would serve us higher position in the long term.  We went through Google's change of address tool and over a period of 2 to 3 weeks we went from being off the map with our new domain to showing up again around page 2 - 14-18th position.  It seemed that our climb back corresponded to Google indexing our new urls.  Each time a large batch was indexed we seemed to jump back up.  But, in our last report we noticed that we didn't budge any higher and some of our non-branded keywords actually dropped a little. The old domain was "citychurchfamily.org" and the new domain is "citychurchbloomington.org".  We were thinking that the latter would be a stronger domain in the long term. Any insights on why we haven't fully retained our former ranking value at this point or anything I should be focusing on? We are trying to rank for this phrase "churches in bloomington, in".   Thanks!

[a_toohill]

Hi John,

Thank-you for your insight.  Question, what tools did you use to do the quick check on our site?  Was it the screaming from app or something else?  Just want to learn how you did that.

I've went ahead and fixed the chained 301 redirect and fixed a number of the 301 redirects that were formerly not working as I initially thought they were.

What tools would you recommend to me for creating the static xml sitemap and do I need to do this for all the old pages on the site or just the ones with more traffic?

Also, once the static xml sitemap is created do I submit it on the new domain or the old domain?  Probably a beginner type question here but just wanted to make sure

Finally, the change of address via google webmaster console happened for these domains:  http://www.citychurchfamily.org/ and this:  https://www.citychurchfamily.org/

Should I do the change of address for both the non-www versions as well?

Your help/insight is greatly appreciated.

[dohertyjf]

Hey Andrew, thanks for putting this question to the community! Definitely a good one to dig into and remind a lot of people as to some of the basics.

It sounds like you've done a bunch of the things you should do to migrate your traffic. But, I've found a few things with just a quick glance that are definitely hurting your new domain's ranking ability. Here we go.

1. Your HTTP from your old domain redirects to the HTTPS of the old and then to the HTTPS of the new. Often I have seen that Google will treat chained 301 redirects like this as a 302 redirect, which may mean that some of your important citychurchfamily.org pages are not dropping out of the index. What you want to do is change the logic so that it works like this:

2. http://citychurchfamily.org -> https://citychurchbloomington.org

3. Your www.citychurchfamily.org (non HTTPS) redirects correctly, as does your https://www.citychurchfamily.org.

4. You still have a lot of pages from citychurchfamily.org that are indexed. Check out this site: search for your domain. You need to redirect all of those as I bet there is link equity there.

Another trick you can do to get your old pages that are redirected, but haven't dropped from the index yet out of the index is to create a static XML sitemap with those old URLs and submit that to Google through Search Console. Monitor the indexation (it should drop pretty quick if your 301s are correct) and once they're all out (or very close to it) then remove the sitemap.

Finally, did you do the site migration in Search Console for both http and https version of your old site? That may help as well.

Hope all that helps!

John

[EGOL]

I honestly believe that your visitors must retrain Google about your website and organization.

When you moved away from your old domain you lost its long history of domain queries, navigational queries, branded searches, and visitor engagement.  Slowly, these will return as your visitor base begins to engage your site and ask for it by name.  These metrics don't flow through a 301.

This is how I believe it works for websites who owe their rankings to the strength of their tribe.  Very different from websites who owe their rankings to the linkbuilder.