host posted on August 16, 2008 04:27
On August the 1st Meon Creative changed their domain name to coincide with out re-brand from In8 Design. We knew that Google wouldn’t take it well and that we would probably see a drop in our rankings – although we never really appreciated how much!
As you can imagine, this is not the ideas situation for a web business that has just stepped up its impetus on growth and invested time and money into marketing. We had read that we could expect to drop by a page, maybe two and that the effects could last for anything up to 6 months while Google assessed you in its proverbial ‘Sand box’. 6 months on page two is an inconvenience, but 6 months on page six is a potential show stopper!
We continued our optimization efforts and began amending as many incoming links to reflect the new domain name as possible. We were using a 301 permanent redirect to take our visitors to the new domain, despite reading that a 302 temporary redirect would buy us more time to regain links – we were determined to follow the rules to hopefully appeal to Google’s better nature.
It is also worth mentioning that we remained on the first page on other search engines (Yahoo, MSN Live) after only experiencing a couple of listings drop.
So, a month and a half later, we are finally making some progress – thankfully! We can now be found on the first or second page of most of our keywords/phrases but we are hoping to push ourselves back up shortly… watch this space.
Anna
Meon Creative