Well….the Big G (Google for those that are not internet nerds!), came by our old website, Awebtech.com, and found a whole bunch of 301 redirects all over the site sending users to our new website, BrianJosephStudios.com.
Awebtech.com has ranked firmly in the top 3 for all of our targetted keyword phrases, and we receive a large amount of traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN (Live).
So, for a while we had both websites up and finally we decided to make the full switch over to Brian Joseph Studios as our main company name. Here’s where it gets messy!
On all pages on awebtech.com, we had to add a server side redirect to the corresponding pages on brianjosephstudios.com. For example, if we had a page : http://awebtech.com/web-design/ we had to add a redirect to a similar page on our new site…like this https://brianjosephstudios.com/web-design/ .
So, with every page on awebtech.com re-directing the user to brianjosephstudios.com, Google gets a little worried (temporarily) about both websites. This is due to the fact that spam websites, and black hat seo’s will use re-directs of all kinds to spam the search engines, showing users something else.
301 re-directs are the correct way to transfer your site over to a new domain name. They are also widely acknowledged as the favored redirect method for all search engines.
The problem with it is though that Google knocks your new site down quite a bit for a short period of time, until it figures out what exactly is going on. So, right now, our website is not ranking as high as it did before all of this was implemented. However, we expect our rankings to come back within a week or two , and when they do, they will come back even stronger.