301 Redirect & Google Ranking moving Domain Name Change and Web Site Speed

Recently watched a website move it’s domain name from breton-homes.com to www.brittany-property-direct.com the domain name move was accomplished with the use of 301 Redirects.  The new website kept the same structure as the old website so that all of the 301 redirects mapped from old pages to the corresponding pages on the new website.

Initially the website lost no ranking at all with Google as google still delivered results for the old website. Then Google started displaying some results for the new site after a few days, then after a week the new site ‘Slipped’ in the rankings by a page on some of the most competitive keyword search terms. After a few more days Google seemed to get to grips with the new site and it moved back up to the first page again, this time 1 position down from the old site. This may not be due so much to the 301 redirects and move as to Google introducing new site speed factors into their website ranking calculations.

With the advent of site speed in Google website ranking calculations we have started to trim the code behind all of our sites, one notable area is the inclusion of Google Adsense. Google Adsense is very slow to load and often doubles (or worse) the download time for a website. I and others have asked Google if they take into account their own Google Adsense scripts when they calculate a web sites speed – they could be shooting themselves in the foot financially with this new website ranking factor.

In summary the domain name move using 301 redirects caused a small dip in traffic for a couple of weeks on www.brittany-property-direct.com but is now back where it was before the domain name change/move took place. Adsense has been taken off the home page in an attempt to improve page load speed while we look at other areas to improve performance.

Will post as soon as we get a response from Google about Adsense and site speed calculations. I have not included all of the things we did in the domain name move, Google itself offers some advice on this, if you want help please post a message below.

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