Guess what? It shouldn't be so hard period and none of the things that the OP had to do that were mentioned should even need to be done at all. Google should offer a way to make a changes like this similar to the way that you can change an account name or a username at other businesses. If they have to charge a fee for this, fine. If they want to put in conditions so it can't be abused or gamed, fine. But all of this dancing on eggshells in order to please a company that has (for these types of things) no accountability is over the top. I am surprised that nobody has done any kind of class action lawsuit against google for some of their arbitrary and difficult practices or tried to get lawmakers involved (as much as I hate both options sometimes you have to pull the trigger...)<p>Edit: And you shouldn't need hours and days of test prep, anxiety or needing to hire SEO experts to pull it off either. Ridiculous.
Related or not, this is certainly against the "rules": <a href="https://www.painscience.com/donate-by-linking.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.painscience.com/donate-by-linking.php</a>
This is one of the reasons why I would probably never, ever, ever try build a business around any kind of content marketing (as controversial as that sounds.) I know that content marketing is all the rage at the moment and few books would advise against doing it for customer acquisition: but there is always that hidden, implicit assumption with this technique that the organic traffic you build up belongs to you (which is provably false.) It's quite deceptive to think of organic traffic as an asset when Google can take it away at any time (and often without even realizing.) Instead: I would much rather use explicit paid channels and relationships with advertisers then depend on the good graces of Google for my conversions.<p>I hope that OPs business can recover in time and thanks for posting this. You will probably save a lot of people thousands of dollars in the long run.
"If you have a blog, you can improve my chances by linking to PainScience.com."<p>Google doesn't take well to people asking for links to their site. Asking for links, buying for links, or spamming your link is something that Google doesn't like. Just from this, I can already see your expertise in SEO. Although having this post at the top of Hacker News is going to help this a bit.<p>Anyone with basic SEO knowledge could have told you the pitfalls of transferring domains. This reads closer to trying to blame Google for your lack of traffic, rather than what you learned from the experience. From my experience, Google's algorithm is finicky, but if your site is sound and has good content you have little to fear.
What's not captured in this writeup is SERP rank (if for equivalent terms the new site is ranking better or worse than previously), it's only showing the resulting traffic.<p>I wonder what affect people seeing the domain "PainScience" instead of "SaveYourself" in the results caused.<p>However, it's a near certainty that you're going to lose rank and traffic with a domain name move. Estimates vary but 10-20% isn't an unreasonable guesstimate even if everything goes right.<p>I can also confirm the deep weirdness of GWT and how it treats sites (seriously, it considered <a href="http://domain.com" rel="nofollow">http://domain.com</a> and <a href="https://domain.com" rel="nofollow">https://domain.com</a> as two entirely separate sites).
This guy actually has some of the highest quality writing I've ever read on a subject. I used it to help my back pain couple of years ago.<p>If there is anyone at Google reading this, give this guy a manual boost or something, you won't find better quality info anywhere.
> By early 2015, I had an overwhelming impression that Google is a much sloppier technology than I ever imagined.<p>After working there, I can definitely agree with this. Their engineering chops are pretty high but not only are there tons of bugs with their products (though complexity can cause that), but they also have very poor documentation for everything, so if you run into an awesome bug, your likeliness for finding an obvious solution without having to pnig the team responsible is about as reliable as a coin toss.
If I was to try to take steps to try to avoid this the next time around, it sounds it would be, if moving an HTTP site to a new domain using HTTPS:<p><pre><code> # move to new URL but keep using HTTP
# wait for search rank to reach parity, maybe leave it for some buffer
# upgrade site to use HTTPS
</code></pre>
This sounds like it might prevent the issues with migration in GWT.
We saw a similar traffic dip moving openlistings.co -> openlistings.com. Really thought that the domain mover tool in google webmaster tools would have taken care of it but we were unpleasantly surprised that it didn't. Luckily for us, we pulled the band-aid off pretty early and only saw like a 2 week dip before we were beating the previous numbers.<p>Slightly unrelated but on the topic of SEO in JS SPAs, Google did a really good job with it's latest iteration of the JS crawler [0]. When we made the switch from sending pre-rendered HTML to treating the crawler like a regular user, our rankings actually improved because initial pageload time went from a few seconds to sub 300ms.<p>[0]: <a href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/10/deprecating-our-ajax-crawling-scheme.html" rel="nofollow">http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/10/deprecati...</a>
No idea if this is the cause, and I agree the process shouldn't be this opaque, but "pain relief" is a pretty big category of spam. It's possible that those keywords in the domain are detrimental.
Guys, thanks for your comments. I've submitted the link as I've been outraged by this story. I find Paul's website to be a goldmine of carefully selected, beautifully written information that can save people lots of pain (well, literally...). It's hard to say what the solution to cases like this should be, but I believe until the technology gets easier to handle, there should be some sort of regulations, or companies should take the initiative of handling such situations if it's their responsibility. Search engines can't be like black boxes, there's people whose business relies on them and like someone said, I'd expect a level of automation that makes it easy to deal with such scenarios. A content creator shouldn't even worry about all this stuff at all! We are talking about a simple domain migration, that's it. The "Donate by linking" page was published only a week ago, so even though it's a good point trying to address that as well, it can't be the reason for the disaster.
Hasn't Google evolved from the original backrub algo? More implicit links than anchor tags, with user personalized results. Wouldn't local browser history get clobbered? My browser autofills URLs; typing in "n" autocompletes with "<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com"" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com"</a><p>Or maybe it is the brand? PainScience is a rather negative in that it focuses on the problem, whereas SaveYourself focuses on the solution.
I observed similar experience making similar move for my blog (idreamcatcher.com -> presentlove.com)<p>The reason I think is there is some sort of "grandfathered" organic ranking component that belongs to old domain but is not being transferred to new domain, no matter what recommended practices are followed and no matter what Google says.
I've read similar horror stories. Everyone should be aware of this penalties and the numerous steps that need to be taken:<p><a href="https://moz.com/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains" rel="nofollow">https://moz.com/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains</a>
The main issue seems to be that Google Webmaster Tools isn't handling HTTPS yet.<p>Major shortcoming on Google's part, but why not add HTTP support to the new domain and see if that helps? (based on the article it didn't sound like it had been tried)
Why would you make a change like that in November/December, assuming you're selling something which is popular with consumers (or with calendar-year focused businesses with budgets to spend)?
I've seen Black hat SEO tips saying you should set up a network of sites, one with fake/paid links to it, the second a redirect of the first, and some other stuff I don't recall right now. The point was that a ban of the domain would let you change to a new domain and keep all the paid links, and it would somehow fool Google's algorithm.<p>Just saying, there are legitimate reasons Google may have decided to penalize domain names. People do abuse them.