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  <body-formatted>&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A few caveats before we dive in:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ol&gt;
&lt;li&gt;I only really talk about Google in terms of search engines as it is so
dominant and this is particularly true for us.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;When I talk about search &#8216;rankings&#8217;, what I really mean is the volume of
organically referred search traffic. Ranking obsession is dangerous and
increasingly pointless as everyone sees their own personalised results. So
&#8216;ranking&#8217; I use really as a proxy for search-referred site visits.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;I&#8217;m not a great believer in PageRank in as far as you can have a high
PageRank and not get rankings and vice versa. So when I talk about PageRank
here I mean in the vaguest possible sense of &#8216;reputation&#8217; or &#8216;credibility&#8217; or
&#8216;authority&#8217;.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;I&#8217;m also pretty sceptical about anything that Google shows in the main
search engine as being anything other than vaguely indicative e.g. the site: or
link: commands don&#8217;t give data that is even nearly accurate or complete.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ol&gt;
&lt;p style=""&gt;&#160;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style=""&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background to Site
Changes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The reasons for completely updating the site are explained
in my &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/blog/3074-ashley-friedlein-talks-about-the-new-econsultancy-site"&gt;interview
about the new Econsultancy site&lt;/a&gt;. Further details are&#160;given in our press
release &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/press-releases/4007-econsultancy-invests-500-000-into-new-website"&gt;Econsultancy
invests $500,000 into new website&lt;/a&gt;. On the domain change from &lt;a href="http://www.e-consultancy.com/"&gt;http://www.e-consultancy.com&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/"&gt;http://econsultancy.com&lt;/a&gt; I&#8217;ve also posted a
reply to a question on this in our forum: &#8220;&lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/forums/best-practice/why-did-econsultancy-drop-the-www"&gt;Why
did Econsultancy drop the www?&lt;/a&gt;&#8221;.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What did we do from
an SEO point of view for the site migration?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The short version of &#8216;what we did&#8217; from an SEO migration
point of view was only two things:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Firstly, we used &lt;a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_301"&gt;301 Moved Permanently redirects&lt;/a&gt;
for all old pages which had corresponding pages on the new site. We did this by
exporting all the links (80,000+) that Google told us about via &lt;a href="http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/"&gt;Google Webmaster Tools&lt;/a&gt;&#8217; &#8220;Links&#160; &amp;gt;&#160;
Pages with external links&#8221; and writing a script to do all the redirects
where there were database IDs for the old and corresponding new content, making
the mapping and redirects quite straight forwards even at this volume. Then we
did non-database-d content (e.g. flat HTML pages, including the &#8216;About&#8217;
sections, key section pages etc.) &#8216;manually&#8217;.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Secondly, we verified the new site within Google Webmaster
Tools so that we could keep an eye on how it was being crawled and so on. We
also set the geographic target audience to &#8216;United States&#8217; here given our
business and content is increasingly there. Previously this wasn&#8217;t set to
anything. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We didn&#8217;t contact Google in any way (I don&#8217;t think you
can?), and we didn&#8217;t do anything in phases &#8211; more of a Big Bang approach!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&#160;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;What has happened
to our natural Search Referrals since the new site launch?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The graph below, showing, in Google Analytics, the number of
non-paid visits referred by Google since the launch, tells the story best. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We had a brief honeymoon period where we got &#8216;double
rankings&#8217; where the old site and the corresponding page on the new site *both*
ranked well on Google meaning our page coverage was outstanding. On the old
site we used to get around 3,500 visits a day referred by Google natural search
&#8211; here we peaked at over 4,000. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;And then things went a bit quiet... It was Christmas so this
is not atypical. But it hasn&#8217;t picked up since. Following are some more details
broken down by time period following the relaunch.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;img alt="Econsultancy Google Referrals" height="175" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3488/3253405538_dc46da21bd_o.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px;" width="480" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&#160;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;Weeks 1-2 following
site relaunch&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;Rankings / Referred Natural Search Traffic: &lt;/strong&gt;This
went up in the first week (as you can see from graph above) as we
&#8216;double-ranked&#8217; for both the old site and the corresponding page on the new
site giving us great page coverage. It then fell away &#8211; not unusual given it
was Christmas / New Year which is historically very quiet for us.&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;Indexation / De-indexation: &lt;/strong&gt;The old site was
still all showing in Google and in Webmaster tools. The new site was being
indexed however &#8211; around 20% had been indexed by the end of the second week.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&#160;&lt;strong style=""&gt;External Page Links: &lt;/strong&gt;We were getting
links to the new site (around 50 a day) but these weren&#8217;t visible in Google
Webmaster Tools. Legacy links still showed as pointing to the old domain.&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;PageRank: &lt;/strong&gt;Nothing showing on the new site.&#160;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;Other e.g. Site links, Google News, Google Alerts, Images etc.: &lt;/strong&gt;Our
Sitelinks (the sub-links to site sections shown in the search results)
disappeared. And our Google News Feed was broken so we contacted Google News to
get this fixed. Likewise Google Alerts for our domain dried up.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;Weeks 3-4 following
site relaunch&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;Rankings / Referred Natural Search Traffic: &lt;/strong&gt;No improvement
in search traffic as per graph above. And the referrals we do get are almost
all searches on our brand name or for &#8216;long tail&#8217; keywords for newly created
content which has new links since the launch i.e. the legacy content doesn&#8217;t
appear to be ranking any more.&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;Indexation / De-indexation: &lt;/strong&gt;The old site now
had only 7,590 pages showing in the index (using &lt;a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&amp;amp;rlz=1C1GGLS_en-GBGB291GB303&amp;amp;q=site:www.e-consultancy.com&amp;amp;btnG=Search&amp;amp;meta="&gt;site:www.e-consultancy.com&lt;/a&gt;)
when it had been over 40,000 before the changeover. So the de-indexing was
happening very fast. The indexation of the new site was also up to over 20,000
pages, around one third of the actual number of pages (using &lt;a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&amp;amp;rlz=1C1GGLS_en-GBGB291GB303&amp;amp;q=site:econsultancy.com&amp;amp;btnG=Search&amp;amp;meta="&gt;site:econsultancy.com&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;External Page Links: &lt;/strong&gt;New links were
showing up in Google Webmaster Tools to the new site. Legacy links to the old
site no longer showed up as pointing to the old domain, however neither did
they show up as pointing (via 301 redirects) to the new site. They seemed to
have &#8216;disappeared&#8217;.&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;PageRank: &lt;/strong&gt;Now showing on the new site. All the key
section pages (&lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/reports"&gt;Reports&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/training"&gt;Training&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/events"&gt;Events&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/jobs"&gt;Jobs&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/directories"&gt;Directories&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/blog"&gt;Blog&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/forums"&gt;Forums&lt;/a&gt;) maintained their PageRank, or
it improved. The Blog has the highest PageRank (due, no doubt to the large
number of inbound links) at 6. Strangely, however, our homepage&#8217;s PageRank had
dropped from 5 to 3. This might be because our new homepage, for non-logged in
visitors like the Googlebot, has less dynamic content on it so fewer links and
less frequently updated content?&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;Other e.g. Site links, Google News, Google Alerts, Images etc.: &lt;/strong&gt;Our
Sitelinks reappeared in Google Webmaster Tools at week 4 and then almost
immediately in the main index (&lt;a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=econsultancy&amp;amp;sourceid=navclient-ff&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;rlz=1B3GGGL_enGB308GB308"&gt;search
on Econsultancy to see main listing&lt;/a&gt;). Our Google News Feed was back up and
running (see &lt;a href="http://news.google.com/news?ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;as_drrb=q&amp;amp;as_qdr=m&amp;amp;q=site:econsultancy.com&amp;amp;scoring=n"&gt;recent
stories on Google News&lt;/a&gt;) and we were coming through in Google Alerts as
before.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;Weeks 5-6 (now)
following site relaunch&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;Rankings / Referred Natural Search Traffic: &lt;/strong&gt;Still no
improvement in search traffic as per graph above and the referrals we do get
are still predominantly brand searches. By now, if you search on the old &#8216;&lt;a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?rlz=1C1GGLS_en-GBGB291GB303&amp;amp;aq=f&amp;amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;q=e-consultancy"&gt;e-consultancy&lt;/a&gt;&#8217;
Google brings back results only from the new site, so it appears to know that
what was once &#8216;e-consultancy&#8217; at the old domain, is now only at the new domain.&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;Indexation / De-indexation: &lt;/strong&gt;The old site now
has only 1,490 pages showing in the index (using &lt;a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&amp;amp;rlz=1C1GGLS_en-GBGB291GB303&amp;amp;q=site:www.e-consultancy.com&amp;amp;btnG=Search&amp;amp;meta="&gt;site:www.e-consultancy.com&lt;/a&gt;).
The indexation of the new site has gone up to 26,500 pages (using &lt;a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&amp;amp;rlz=1C1GGLS_en-GBGB291GB303&amp;amp;q=site:econsultancy.com&amp;amp;btnG=Search&amp;amp;meta="&gt;site:econsultancy.com&lt;/a&gt;
in Google). &lt;a href="http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Feconsultancy.com&amp;amp;bwmf=s"&gt;Yahoo!
shows more at 33,000+&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;External Page Links: &lt;/strong&gt;As per graphic
below&lt;strong style=""&gt; &lt;/strong&gt;all legacy links are now
showing in Webmaster Tools (over 90,000) as linking to the new site, so it
appears that Google has figured out that the old pages have &#8216;become&#8217; their new
equivalents.&lt;strong style=""&gt; &lt;/strong&gt;However, this is not
reflected on the main index using the &lt;a href="http://www.google.com/search?sa=N&amp;amp;tab=nw&amp;amp;q=link:econsultancy.com"&gt;link:econsultancy.com&lt;/a&gt;
command which shows only the links acquired since launch &#8211; 563 at the time of
writing. Yahoo! is now showing 52,444 inbound links to the new domain (using &lt;a href="http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Feconsultancy.com&amp;amp;bwm=i&amp;amp;bwmo=&amp;amp;bwmf=s"&gt;Yahoo!
Site Explorer&lt;/a&gt;). Checking for links to the old domain on Google (&lt;a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&amp;amp;rlz=1C1GGLS_en-GBGB291GB303&amp;amp;q=link%3Awww.e-consultancy.com&amp;amp;btnG=Search&amp;amp;meta="&gt;link:www.e-consultancy.com&lt;/a&gt;)
now brings back the same results as for link:econsultancy.com so, again, Google
appears to understand they are the same thing and that &#8216;econsultancy.com&#8217; is
now the primary / master domain.&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;PageRank: &lt;/strong&gt;No change &#8211; as above.&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;Other e.g. Site links, Google News, Google Alerts, Images etc.: &lt;/strong&gt;No
change &#8211; as above.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;img alt="Econsultancy external page links" height="417" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3021/3253405612_4e7d1c6a7a_o.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px;" width="480" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;So what are we
working on now?&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;/strong&gt;A number of things including:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Looking at &#8216;Not found&#8217; 404 errors
reported within Webmaster Tools&#8217; &#8220;Diagnostics&#160;
&amp;gt;&#160; Web crawl&#8221; to 301 redirect
any pages we can.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Updating key links to our new domain
&#8211; we can&#8217;t expect to update all 50,000+ but, for some, e.g. our &lt;a href="http://www.dmoz.org/"&gt;dmoz.org&lt;/a&gt; listing we&#8217;re making the effort.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Continuing to get new links for the
new site. Though this is mostly done via focusing on content and marketing/PR
as opposed to explicit &#8216;link building&#8217; efforts. The latter includes listings
sites and directories (e.g. for our training and events). Also, we&#8217;re continue
to build out our feeds and distribution (e.g. jobs data to job aggregators).&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Working on getting images coming
through in Google News and Alerts. Not directly an SEO thing, however. More
about increasing click throughs &#8211; to then get links, to improve SEO indirectly.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Doing more PPC to make up for shortfall
in natural search traffic. No wonder Google is in no hurry to make the
updates... ;)&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Bits of on page optimisation and
internal link optimisation to promote the relevant pages within the site.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Reviewing whether to update the
current homepage for non-logged in visitors (including Googlebot) to include
more dynamic content so it refreshes more often and has more links and keywords
on it. Not convinced this will help but worth a try.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&#160;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong style=""&gt;What have we learned?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Page/URL changes
within a domain seem to be updated pretty fast (within a few weeks) assuming
you do the 301 redirects correctly. Not so for domain name changes it would
appear. Some people report 4 weeks, some 6, some 90 days, for the latter. We&#8217;re
at 6 weeks now...&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The indexation and de-indexation process happened over a
matter of weeks too.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Webmaster Tools is useful for getting some insight into
where Google is up to. However, it&#8217;s not clear what time lags there are between
what you see in Webmaster Tools and how this translates to the main index.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We&#8217;re struggling to explain the drop in PageRank for our
homepage which has the most inbound links, particularly when PageRank carried
across fine in all other instances. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, we&#8217;re playing a waiting game... All that&#8217;s now
missing is that search traffic. Ask me again in a month whether, in hindsight,
we shouldn&#8217;t have changed the domain name at all, whatever the brand police
might say!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;
&lt;em&gt;(p.s. any useful tips, advice for us going
forwards greatly appreciated)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</body-formatted>
  <body-unformatted>&lt;p&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-weight: bold;"&gt;A few caveats before we dive in:&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ol&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;"&gt;I only really talk about Google in terms of search engines as it is so
dominant and this is particularly true for us.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;When I talk about search &amp;lsquo;rankings&amp;rsquo;, what I really mean is the volume of
organically referred search traffic. Ranking obsession is dangerous and
increasingly pointless as everyone sees their own personalised results. So
&amp;lsquo;ranking&amp;rsquo; I use really as a proxy for search-referred site visits.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;I&amp;rsquo;m not a great believer in PageRank in as far as you can have a high
PageRank and not get rankings and vice versa. So when I talk about PageRank
here I mean in the vaguest possible sense of &amp;lsquo;reputation&amp;rsquo; or &amp;lsquo;credibility&amp;rsquo; or
&amp;lsquo;authority&amp;rsquo;.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;I&amp;rsquo;m also pretty sceptical about anything that Google shows in the main
search engine as being anything other than vaguely indicative e.g. the site: or
link: commands don&amp;rsquo;t give data that is even nearly accurate or complete.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ol&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:18.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1"&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:18.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 14px;"&gt;Background to Site
Changes&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;
font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;The reasons for completely updating the site are explained
in my &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/blog/3074-ashley-friedlein-talks-about-the-new-econsultancy-site"&gt;interview
about the new Econsultancy site&lt;/a&gt;. Further details are&amp;nbsp;given in our press
release &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/press-releases/4007-econsultancy-invests-500-000-into-new-website"&gt;Econsultancy
invests $500,000 into new website&lt;/a&gt;. On the domain change from &lt;a href="http://www.e-consultancy.com/"&gt;http://www.e-consultancy.com&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/"&gt;http://econsultancy.com&lt;/a&gt; I&amp;rsquo;ve also posted a
reply to a question on this in our forum: &amp;ldquo;&lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/forums/best-practice/why-did-econsultancy-drop-the-www"&gt;Why
did Econsultancy drop the www?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;rdquo;.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;
font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 14px;"&gt;What did we do from
an SEO point of view for the site migration?&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;
font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;The short version of &amp;lsquo;what we did&amp;rsquo; from an SEO migration
point of view was only two things:&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;
font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Firstly, we used &lt;a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_301"&gt;301 Moved Permanently redirects&lt;/a&gt;
for all old pages which had corresponding pages on the new site. We did this by
exporting all the links (80,000+) that Google told us about via &lt;a href="http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/"&gt;Google Webmaster Tools&lt;/a&gt;&amp;rsquo; &amp;ldquo;Links&lt;span style="mso-spacerun:yes"&gt;&amp;nbsp; &lt;/span&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;span style="mso-spacerun:yes"&gt;&amp;nbsp;
&lt;/span&gt;Pages with external links&amp;rdquo; and writing a script to do all the redirects
where there were database IDs for the old and corresponding new content, making
the mapping and redirects quite straight forwards even at this volume. Then we
did non-database-d content (e.g. flat HTML pages, including the &amp;lsquo;About&amp;rsquo;
sections, key section pages etc.) &amp;lsquo;manually&amp;rsquo;.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;
font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Secondly, we verified the new site within Google Webmaster
Tools so that we could keep an eye on how it was being crawled and so on. We
also set the geographic target audience to &amp;lsquo;United States&amp;rsquo; here given our
business and content is increasingly there. Previously this wasn&amp;rsquo;t set to
anything. &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;
font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;We didn&amp;rsquo;t contact Google in any way (I don&amp;rsquo;t think you
can?), and we didn&amp;rsquo;t do anything in phases &amp;ndash; more of a Big Bang approach!&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;
font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;What has happened
to our natural Search Referrals since the new site launch?&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;
font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;The graph below, showing, in Google Analytics, the number of
non-paid visits referred by Google since the launch, tells the story best. &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;
font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;We had a brief honeymoon period where we got &amp;lsquo;double
rankings&amp;rsquo; where the old site and the corresponding page on the new site *both*
ranked well on Google meaning our page coverage was outstanding. On the old
site we used to get around 3,500 visits a day referred by Google natural search
&amp;ndash; here we peaked at over 4,000. &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;
font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;And then things went a bit quiet... It was Christmas so this
is not atypical. But it hasn&amp;rsquo;t picked up since. Following are some more details
broken down by time period following the relaunch.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;img style="border: 1px solid black; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px;" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3488/3253405538_dc46da21bd_o.jpg" alt="Econsultancy Google Referrals" width="480" height="175" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Weeks 1-2 following
site relaunch&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Rankings / Referred Natural Search Traffic: &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;This
went up in the first week (as you can see from graph above) as we
&amp;lsquo;double-ranked&amp;rsquo; for both the old site and the corresponding page on the new
site giving us great page coverage. It then fell away &amp;ndash; not unusual given it
was Christmas / New Year which is historically very quiet for us.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Indexation / De-indexation: &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;The old site was
still all showing in Google and in Webmaster tools. The new site was being
indexed however &amp;ndash; around 20% had been indexed by the end of the second week.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="mso-list:Ignore"&gt;&lt;span style="font:7.0pt &amp;quot;Times New Roman&amp;quot;"&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;External Page Links: &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;We were getting
links to the new site (around 50 a day) but these weren&amp;rsquo;t visible in Google
Webmaster Tools. Legacy links still showed as pointing to the old domain.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;PageRank: &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;
line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Nothing showing on the new site.&amp;nbsp;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;
line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Other e.g. Site links, Google News, Google Alerts, Images etc.: &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Our
Sitelinks (the sub-links to site sections shown in the search results)
disappeared. And our Google News Feed was broken so we contacted Google News to
get this fixed. Likewise Google Alerts for our domain dried up.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Weeks 3-4 following
site relaunch&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Rankings / Referred Natural Search Traffic: &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;No improvement
in search traffic as per graph above. And the referrals we do get are almost
all searches on our brand name or for &amp;lsquo;long tail&amp;rsquo; keywords for newly created
content which has new links since the launch i.e. the legacy content doesn&amp;rsquo;t
appear to be ranking any more.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Indexation / De-indexation: &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;The old site now
had only 7,590 pages showing in the index (using &lt;a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&amp;amp;rlz=1C1GGLS_en-GBGB291GB303&amp;amp;q=site:www.e-consultancy.com&amp;amp;btnG=Search&amp;amp;meta="&gt;site:www.e-consultancy.com&lt;/a&gt;)
when it had been over 40,000 before the changeover. So the de-indexing was
happening very fast. The indexation of the new site was also up to over 20,000
pages, around one third of the actual number of pages (using &lt;a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&amp;amp;rlz=1C1GGLS_en-GBGB291GB303&amp;amp;q=site:econsultancy.com&amp;amp;btnG=Search&amp;amp;meta="&gt;site:econsultancy.com&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;External Page Links: &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;New links were
showing up in Google Webmaster Tools to the new site. Legacy links to the old
site no longer showed up as pointing to the old domain, however neither did
they show up as pointing (via 301 redirects) to the new site. They seemed to
have &amp;lsquo;disappeared&amp;rsquo;.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;PageRank: &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;
line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Now showing on the new site. All the key
section pages (&lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/reports"&gt;Reports&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/training"&gt;Training&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/events"&gt;Events&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/jobs"&gt;Jobs&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/directories"&gt;Directories&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/blog"&gt;Blog&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/forums"&gt;Forums&lt;/a&gt;) maintained their PageRank, or
it improved. The Blog has the highest PageRank (due, no doubt to the large
number of inbound links) at 6. Strangely, however, our homepage&amp;rsquo;s PageRank had
dropped from 5 to 3. This might be because our new homepage, for non-logged in
visitors like the Googlebot, has less dynamic content on it so fewer links and
less frequently updated content?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;
line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Other e.g. Site links, Google News, Google Alerts, Images etc.: &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Our
Sitelinks reappeared in Google Webmaster Tools at week 4 and then almost
immediately in the main index (&lt;a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=econsultancy&amp;amp;sourceid=navclient-ff&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;rlz=1B3GGGL_enGB308GB308"&gt;search
on Econsultancy to see main listing&lt;/a&gt;). Our Google News Feed was back up and
running (see &lt;a href="http://news.google.com/news?ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;as_drrb=q&amp;amp;as_qdr=m&amp;amp;q=site:econsultancy.com&amp;amp;scoring=n"&gt;recent
stories on Google News&lt;/a&gt;) and we were coming through in Google Alerts as
before.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:36.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Weeks 5-6 (now)
following site relaunch&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Rankings / Referred Natural Search Traffic: &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Still no
improvement in search traffic as per graph above and the referrals we do get
are still predominantly brand searches. By now, if you search on the old &amp;lsquo;&lt;a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?rlz=1C1GGLS_en-GBGB291GB303&amp;amp;aq=f&amp;amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;amp;q=e-consultancy"&gt;e-consultancy&lt;/a&gt;&amp;rsquo;
Google brings back results only from the new site, so it appears to know that
what was once &amp;lsquo;e-consultancy&amp;rsquo; at the old domain, is now only at the new domain.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Indexation / De-indexation: &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;The old site now
has only 1,490 pages showing in the index (using &lt;a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&amp;amp;rlz=1C1GGLS_en-GBGB291GB303&amp;amp;q=site:www.e-consultancy.com&amp;amp;btnG=Search&amp;amp;meta="&gt;site:www.e-consultancy.com&lt;/a&gt;).
The indexation of the new site has gone up to 26,500 pages (using &lt;a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&amp;amp;rlz=1C1GGLS_en-GBGB291GB303&amp;amp;q=site:econsultancy.com&amp;amp;btnG=Search&amp;amp;meta="&gt;site:econsultancy.com&lt;/a&gt;
in Google). &lt;a href="http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Feconsultancy.com&amp;amp;bwmf=s"&gt;Yahoo!
shows more at 33,000+&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;span style="mso-spacerun:yes"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="mso-spacerun:yes"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;External Page Links: &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;As per graphic
below&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"&gt; &lt;/strong&gt;all legacy links are now
showing in Webmaster Tools (over 90,000) as linking to the new site, so it
appears that Google has figured out that the old pages have &amp;lsquo;become&amp;rsquo; their new
equivalents.&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"&gt; &lt;/strong&gt;However, this is not
reflected on the main index using the &lt;a href="http://www.google.com/search?sa=N&amp;amp;tab=nw&amp;amp;q=link:econsultancy.com"&gt;link:econsultancy.com&lt;/a&gt;
command which shows only the links acquired since launch &amp;ndash; 563 at the time of
writing. Yahoo! is now showing 52,444 inbound links to the new domain (using &lt;a href="http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Feconsultancy.com&amp;amp;bwm=i&amp;amp;bwmo=&amp;amp;bwmf=s"&gt;Yahoo!
Site Explorer&lt;/a&gt;). Checking for links to the old domain on Google (&lt;a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&amp;amp;rlz=1C1GGLS_en-GBGB291GB303&amp;amp;q=link%3Awww.e-consultancy.com&amp;amp;btnG=Search&amp;amp;meta="&gt;link:www.e-consultancy.com&lt;/a&gt;)
now brings back the same results as for link:econsultancy.com so, again, Google
appears to understand they are the same thing and that &amp;lsquo;econsultancy.com&amp;rsquo; is
now the primary / master domain.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="mso-spacerun:yes"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;PageRank: &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;
line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;No change &amp;ndash; as above.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="mso-spacerun:yes"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;
line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:
normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:
Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Other e.g. Site links, Google News, Google Alerts, Images etc.: &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;No
change &amp;ndash; as above.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;img style="border: 1px solid black; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px;" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3021/3253405612_4e7d1c6a7a_o.jpg" alt="Econsultancy external page links" width="480" height="417" /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;"&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;So what are we
working on now?&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;
font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;A number of things including:&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;"&gt;Looking at &amp;lsquo;Not found&amp;rsquo; 404 errors
reported within Webmaster Tools&amp;rsquo; &amp;ldquo;Diagnostics&lt;span style="mso-spacerun:yes"&gt;&amp;nbsp;
&lt;/span&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;span style="mso-spacerun:yes"&gt;&amp;nbsp; &lt;/span&gt;Web crawl&amp;rdquo; to 301 redirect
any pages we can.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;"&gt;Updating key links to our new domain
&amp;ndash; we can&amp;rsquo;t expect to update all 50,000+ but, for some, e.g. our &lt;a href="http://www.dmoz.org/"&gt;dmoz.org&lt;/a&gt; listing we&amp;rsquo;re making the effort.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;"&gt;Continuing to get new links for the
new site. Though this is mostly done via focusing on content and marketing/PR
as opposed to explicit &amp;lsquo;link building&amp;rsquo; efforts. The latter includes listings
sites and directories (e.g. for our training and events). Also, we&amp;rsquo;re continue
to build out our feeds and distribution (e.g. jobs data to job aggregators).&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;"&gt;Working on getting images coming
through in Google News and Alerts. Not directly an SEO thing, however. More
about increasing click throughs &amp;ndash; to then get links, to improve SEO indirectly.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;"&gt;Doing more PPC to make up for shortfall
in natural search traffic. No wonder Google is in no hurry to make the
updates... ;)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;"&gt;Bits of on page optimisation and
internal link optimisation to promote the relevant pages within the site.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px;"&gt;Reviewing whether to update the
current homepage for non-logged in visitors (including Googlebot) to include
more dynamic content so it refreshes more often and has more links and keywords
on it. Not convinced this will help but worth a try.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;What have we learned?&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;
font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-font-family:&amp;quot;Times New Roman&amp;quot;" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Page/URL changes
within a domain seem to be updated pretty fast (within a few weeks) assuming
you do the 301 redirects correctly. Not so for domain name changes it would
appear. Some people report 4 weeks, some 6, some 90 days, for the latter. We&amp;rsquo;re
at 6 weeks now...&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;
font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;The indexation and de-indexation process happened over a
matter of weeks too.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;
font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Webmaster Tools is useful for getting some insight into
where Google is up to. However, it&amp;rsquo;s not clear what time lags there are between
what you see in Webmaster Tools and how this translates to the main index.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;
font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;We&amp;rsquo;re struggling to explain the drop in PageRank for our
homepage which has the most inbound links, particularly when PageRank carried
across fine in all other instances. &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;
font-family:Arial" lang="EN-GB"&gt;Otherwise, we&amp;rsquo;re playing a waiting game... All that&amp;rsquo;s now
missing is that search traffic. Ask me again in a month whether, in hindsight,
we shouldn&amp;rsquo;t have changed the domain name at all, whatever the brand police
might say!&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;
&lt;span style="font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:Arial;
mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;mso-fareast-language:
EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA" lang="EN-GB"&gt;&lt;span style="font-style: italic;"&gt;(p.s. any useful tips, advice for us going
forwards greatly appreciated)&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</body-unformatted>
  <created-at type="datetime">2009-02-04T13:45:18+00:00</created-at>
  <enabled-blog-comments-count type="integer">71</enabled-blog-comments-count>
  <expertise-level-id type="integer">1</expertise-level-id>
  <extract-format>html</extract-format>
  <extract-formatted>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img alt="Site Migration and SEO impact" height="100" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2170/2512148775_61fa58b4b3_t.jpg" style="float: left;" width="98" /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On 14 December 2008
we relaunched the Econsultancy.com site. This involved a subtle name change (&#8220;E-consultancy&#8221;
became &#8220;Econsultancy&#8221;), a new logo, a completely new look site with a new
directory structure, a new URL, on servers in a different country.&#160;We had to
migrate 10,000s of pages, deleted a load of old ones, and created 10,000s of
new ones.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The background to all this is explained in my &lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/blog/3074-ashley-friedlein-talks-about-the-new-econsultancy-site"&gt;interview
about the new Econsultancy site&lt;/a&gt; &#8211; and question 9, about the SEO impact of
this large change, is the subject of this post.&#160;What has happened to our
previously excellent search rankings since the changeover?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</extract-formatted>
  <extract-unformatted>&lt;p&gt;&lt;img style="float: left;" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2170/2512148775_61fa58b4b3_t.jpg" alt="Site Migration and SEO impact" width="98" height="100" /&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 14px;"&gt;On 14 December 2008
we relaunched the Econsultancy.com site. This involved a subtle name change (&amp;ldquo;E-consultancy&amp;rdquo;
became &amp;ldquo;Econsultancy&amp;rdquo;), a new logo, a completely new look site with a new
directory structure, a new URL, on servers in a different country.&amp;nbsp;We had to
migrate 10,000s of pages, deleted a load of old ones, and created 10,000s of
new ones.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 14px;"&gt;&lt;span style="font-weight: normal;"&gt;The background to all this is explained in my &lt;/span&gt;&lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/blog/3074-ashley-friedlein-talks-about-the-new-econsultancy-site"&gt;&lt;span style="font-weight: normal;"&gt;interview
about the new Econsultancy site&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;span style="font-weight: normal;"&gt; &amp;ndash; and question 9, about the SEO impact of
this large change, is the subject of this post.&amp;nbsp;What has happened to our
previously excellent search rankings since the changeover?&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</extract-unformatted>
  <featured type="boolean">false</featured>
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  <learn-more-formatted>&lt;div style=""&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&#160;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div style=""&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Check out Econsultancy's ultra-comprehensive&#160;&lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/reports/search-engine-optimization-seo-best-practice-guide"&gt;best practice guide for SEO&lt;/a&gt;&#160;(300 pages of practical recommendations). There&#8217;s also a&#160;&lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/reports/search-engine-marketing-buyer-s-guide-2008"&gt;search marketing buyer&#8217;s guide&lt;/a&gt;, if you need guidance on choosing a search agency. We also have a range of&#160;&lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/reports/search-engine-marketing-seo-digital-marketing-template-files"&gt;SEO template files&lt;/a&gt;&#160;that you can use to steer your projects. All-you-can-eat access to Econsultancy costs less than a dollar a day.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&#160;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
</learn-more-formatted>
  <learn-more-unformatted>&lt;p&gt;&lt;span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 16px;"&gt;
&lt;div style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: #ffffff; background-position: initial initial; margin: 8px;"&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: #ffffff; margin: 8px;"&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Check out Econsultancy's ultra-comprehensive&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/reports/search-engine-optimization-seo-best-practice-guide"&gt;best practice guide for SEO&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;(300 pages of practical recommendations). There&amp;rsquo;s also a&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/reports/search-engine-marketing-buyer-s-guide-2008"&gt;search marketing buyer&amp;rsquo;s guide&lt;/a&gt;, if you need guidance on choosing a search agency. We also have a range of&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="http://econsultancy.com/reports/search-engine-marketing-seo-digital-marketing-template-files"&gt;SEO template files&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;that you can use to steer your projects. All-you-can-eat access to Econsultancy costs less than a dollar a day.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</learn-more-unformatted>
  <legacy-article-id type="integer" nil="true"></legacy-article-id>
  <name>Econsultancy Site Migration and SEO Impact - the story so far</name>
  <private type="boolean">false</private>
  <published-at type="datetime">2009-02-04T14:31:00+00:00</published-at>
  <slug>econsultancy-site-migration-and-seo-impact-the-story-so-far</slug>
  <tweetbacks-updated-at type="datetime">2009-04-30T05:38:45+01:00</tweetbacks-updated-at>
  <unpublished-at type="datetime" nil="true"></unpublished-at>
  <updated-at type="datetime">2009-08-17T15:28:22+01:00</updated-at>
  <views-count type="integer">6738</views-count>
</blog-post>
