Climbing back up the rankings

One of the most frustrating things about moving your blog to a new domain is watching your various rankings drop off a cliff and the associated loss in all the things that come with it. Despite all the attention to detail (301 redirects, revisions on all your various social networking profiles, re-writing URLs) you basically cease to exist as far as the search engines are concerned and here we are, now a month later and I’m still crawling my way back to relevance.

Reputation and influence is not portable.

SEO is just a passing hobby of mine. Feeling inspired after the last Webmaster World conference in Las Vegas, I experimented a bit on my old domain and tried to see if I could get myself ranked for “social media advertising” and was pleasantly surprised when it only took me a few weeks to reach the #1 spot for the phrase on all four major search engines. I later realized that the term was not as popular as “social media marketing” so I shifted to focus on that term. I soon ranked highly for that term as well. That was back in January.

I later lost interest and didn’t really think of it until I moved everything over to this new blog on this new domain on August 5th. Right before I pulled the plug on the old blog, I took a snapshot of my rankings on various services and have been tracking my comeback and it’s been pretty slow going.

Here’s a summary of the highest point I had reached on cavitate.net and where I am now on everwas.com:

Rankings for “social media advertising”

• cavitate.net – either 1 or 2 for Google, Yahoo, and MSN. #6 for Ask
• everwas.com – not even in the first 50 results

Rankings for “social media marketing”

• cavitate.net – in the top 30 for Google, Yahoo and MSN, #5 for Ask
• everwas.com – #31 for Google, nowhere on Yahoo, MSN. Ask still has my old domain listed at #17

Technorati Authority. Stowe Boyd had a series of posts where he tracked his rise back up the rankings after he moved his blog which is interesting for comparison except that that was back before Technorati calculated an authority value.

• cavitate.net – 56
• everwas.com – 12

Google Pagerank

• cavitate.net – 4
• everwas.com – not even rated yet, must still be in the “sandbox”

Yahoo! Site Explorer Inlinks – I didn’t measure the inlinks on cavitate.net but I’ve been watching the inlinks climb up and am now at 866.

Google Webmaster Tools Inlinks – I also never got this on the old site but just saw it jump from just a handful to 4, 593 on 9/4

MyBlogLog

• cavitate.net – 126 members in its heyday
• everwas.com – only 5 members have discovered this new site

It’ll be interesting to see if these numbers change much over time. If you feel like giving me a little boost, feel free to link to everwas.com using the phrase “social media marketing” or “social media advertising” and see if that will change things.

Photo by Todd Sampson