

A Web Retailer Buys The Perfect Domain Name. Then Comes a Letdown. - gurgeous
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/business/smallbusiness/newark-nut-company-buys-a-perfect-domain-name-yet-sales-suffer.html

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janesvilleseo
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.

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
<http://nuts.com/nuts/almonds/organic-dark.html> This is a soft 404 and is a
major contributing factor. There may be other issues, but this is a biggie.

