I provided my advice via the comments on the post. I do not think this is an issue with buying a poor domain name. I feel this is an issue in execution. I have helped companies transition their domains from one to another without a huge drop in traffic from Google. This is because you really have to do things by the book on this. Google does provide a nice change of address form via Webmaster Tools. However, as Google states when submitting a request, you need to have your 301 redirects in place. This means, not just for your homepage, but for every page on your site. There needs to be a 1 to 1 301 redirect.<p>In the case of nutsonline there are some issues. As I stated in my comments there Google still has 52,300 pages indexed and some of those pages are from a staging sub domain. If we look at the pages that are not the staging ones for example: www.nutsonline.com/search?q=almonds&t=67+67+49+50 we can notice that while it redirects, it redirects first via a 301 to www.nuts.com/search?q=almonds&t=67+67+49+50 and then via a 302 to <a href="http://nuts.com/nuts/almonds/organic-dark.html" rel="nofollow">http://nuts.com/nuts/almonds/organic-dark.html</a> This is a soft 404 and is a major contributing factor. There may be other issues, but this is a biggie.