A while back I posted an article of my experiences of changing domain names for a site. I basically spoke of the devastating effect the change had made to the traffic the site was receiving and it's ranking in Google. I won't go back into great detail here, for the whole story it's probably best to read the original post. The original post has received a few comments, so for those that are interested I thought I'd post a follow up of where we are now seven months later. I would say it took about five months for traffic to return to the pre-change levels that they were. Here's a list of some of the things I had to do to get things back going again.

1. Chase up as many of the old backlinks that I could and ask the site owners to change their links to point to the new URL's. Most webmasters were very helpful and happy to change their links.
2. Get the links changed in DMOZ: I think this was a critical move, the actual directory change was made much quicker than I'd have expected and the effect on Google rankings seemed to be almost instant.
3. Buy some new paid links and adverts: I did spend some money on a few quality links back to the new site, and I also run an advertising program through stumbleupon which seemed to help a little.
4. Get out a press release: The first thing I did with the new site was pay to have a professional written press release and use some pr websites to get it out there. I won't go into huge details here as I think this probably warrants an article all of its own, so stay tuned for that one.
5. Creating a site map: I created an automatic XML site map in asp.net that was always up to date. I submitted this to all the major search engines that currently accept site maps.
6. Social Bookmarking and Community Sites: I registered with many of these and made sure my site was listed on the page somewhere, Stumbleupon, Digg, MySpace, Squidoo, any I could find.
7. Promote, Promote and Promote: I just kept plugging away anywhere I could think of, discussing the change in forums and including backlinks, talking about my experience on other blogs. Anywhere that I could justify talking about the site, without looking spammy I did.

So I hope this helps anyone who's thinking about a domain name change or just going through the process now. If I can offer two Google tools that really helped me, they are the Google Webmaster site, and Google Analytics. The webmaster site allows you to see everything that Google knows about your site, what pages it has indexed, how often it spiders them and what backlinks each page has. Forget about waiting months to see what your page rank will be, see the real time ranking of every one of your pages now. Also Google Analytics is a great free traffic analysis software that gives details information, on who visits, what they looked at, where they came from and how long they stayed. I know I sound like an advert for Google right now, but really these two tools were vital for me to get back to where I once was. Good luck with it.

I have a dvd review site that has been running in one format or another since the year 2000. The site itself was reasonably successful and made a fair profit at times. Back in the summer of last year the core team on the site decided that we needed to expand in order to future proof the site. DVD as a format probably now has a limited lifespan and we wanted to expand into other areas such as games, music and the new HD formats for movies.

We all agreed that the domain name needed to change as the name was very DVD specific. The site was called dvdlard.co.uk (don't ask it's a long story). So we agreed that when the site was launched we would change the domain name to reflect the change. So the site was now to be called <a href="http://www.digitallard.com/">www.digitallard.com</a>.I was well aware that such a change could have a big impact on traffic, search engine hits etc. so I tried to do everything I could to minimise the hit. I arranged every single page off the old url to redirect to the new site, and I also set the redirects up with proper 301 error messages so that the search engines would know that the pages have moved somewhere else.

I also started going through all of the back links and trying to get those sites to update those links including DMOZ (still pending). To try and boost things along I also had a press release written which I distributed through the likes of PRWeb. I also ensured all the tools were in place like a google site map, rss feeds etc.

Despite all of these things, the change has had a devastating result on traffic. The site has been running for about one month now and traffic is at it's lowest in years. I can see that the search engines know about all of the site pages but they are all ranking very low indeed. Income is at an all time low too and I think I may have to start doing some adwords promotion to try and bring people in.

Things are improving very slowly and I do believe that things will return to normal, but the one lesson I've learned from all of this is to not underestimate the impact of changing a domain name as it's had a major impact for me. If anyone reading this has experience of this and has any tips, please feel free to comment it would be more than welcome.

I can’t claim any credit for this, but I saw a cool blog post today on checking your rankings on keywords in Google without any costly SEO Tools, so I thought I’d share it with you. In order to do this you need to have Firefox browser installed and a plugin called SEO Tools for Firefox. I am sure there are other tools and plugins for different browsers that will do the same but for this example these are the tools we will use. So assuming we are using the tools listed above here is the process.

• First start up Firefox and if you haven’t done so already install the SEO Tools for Firefox. If they’re installed you will see a little SEO icon down in the bottom right of the browser, click this to turn them on or off.
• Go to the Google homepage, make sure your on the default home page not anything customised from your Google account. Click preference and set Google to display 100 results instead of the default.
• Search on your desired keyword / keywords combination, for example I decided to search using my entertainment site for a keyword I knew performed quite well (at time of writing). So for my example I search on “Mario Party”.
• Once you get your search results press CTRL+F to bring up the find function within Firefox, this usually appears at the bottom of the page. Now enter your domain in the find box, in my example digitallard.com. If your page is there Firefox will jump to it’s position and if the SEO tool is turned on you can quickly see which position you rank for that keyword example.

Now I know there are probably many other ways to achieve the same but as I use the SEO Tools anyway I found it a neat little tip and I hadn’t thought to use the tools this way. My thanks to The Unofficial Adsense Blog for the tip and for allowing me to reproduce it here.