Company buys a great domain, but changing domains is hard.
The New York Times has an interesting “case study” today about Newark Nut Company. The company recently bought Nuts.com to replace its existing NutsOnline.com domain name.
You’ll like the reasons the company decided to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for Nuts.com: people couldn’t remember NutsOnline.com, his company was mentioned on Rachel Ray’s show as just Nuts.com, and he was scared that one of his competitors would buy the domain and get an advantage over him.
But so far switching domains has been a big bust. It has nothing to do with the quality of the domain and everything to do with the effect migrating between domains has had on his Google rankings.
The company says it did everything by the book to transfer. Yet Newark Nut Company has seen a 70% drop in organic Google traffic since the change, resulting in 100-150 fewer orders per day.
The article then asks experts for their thoughts on what the company should do. One of the experts is Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman.
I tend to agree with the last expert, who said the smart move would have been to buy Nuts.com and just forward it to NutsOnline.com. But I guess it’s too late to do that now.
Hopefully the attention the company is getting now will help it get back up in the search results.
FX says
I call bullshit and this is a way to get free publicity.
Traffic levels according to compete were higher In Feb and March than prior to holiday season last year. In fact, traffic #s are higher now than at anytime during the past year not counting holiday shopping season of Nov-Dec 2011.
FX says
I do give them credit for executing what seems like a pretty good viral marketing, backlink baiting campaign. Getting featured in NYT, this blog and others.
You can clearly see both Alexa, Compete that he has a lot more more traffic now.
Andrew Allemann says
I dunno, they went through a lot of effort to fake this:
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/crawling-indexing–ranking/Gj5XrvdtEgo
Josh says
Sometimes you feel like a nuts.com, sometimes you don’t.
Rich says
Based on Rick Schwartz theory maybe the bought nuts.co but they don’t know it…i said that ironically because i never believed 100% in Risk’s theory.
That just shows that when you wanna brand your name in to something else you always have a leakage or lose traffic no matter what the extension may be,even with .com
JJ says
They did the right thing by switching and are paying a short term price for long term rewards.
Richard Kershaw says
Exactly, JJ.
Google take weeks/months to catch up when you move domains; that’s just a fact.
In the mean time, they’ve picked up a load of top-grade links from the New York Times etc.
Smell the Glove says
Andrew…..your comment section is messed up again.
All the comments after comment #3 are about a foot down the page and jacked all the way to the left of the screen.
There is also this text garbage shown after comment #3 : –> Josh
No need to post this message, just a heads-up.
John Berryhill says
NutsOnline.com? Oh, I thought that was probably another domain name forum.
rob sequin says
Another example of how tech guys and webmasters KNOW NOTHING about domain names.
Any time a tech guy or webmaster wants to get involved in a domain purchase/sale I cringe.
Like lawyers, they only slow down or kill the deal. (Sorry Berryhill, not directed at you 🙂
rs says
This doesn’t make sense. With a new domain you set up a new site with new content and leave the old site intact. Then you slowly migrate things over and see how it affects google as you go along.
Louise says
Thanx for heads-up! I posted a comment, the gist of which is:
The lesson is: switch to a better domain if you can, but don’t ignore the backlinks, articles with mentions and good reputation the current domain owns. A domain is a brand.
Was Nuts.com really a “clean” domain name? You can try checking at Archive.org or DomainTools, to see if the domain had been penalized by Google. Sometimes names parked by sellers get penalized.
The “experts” who effected the transition didn’t think it through. SEO is an imprecise field. It is changing. Smooth transitions are the ones handled with kid gloves, with slow, conservative changes over time. Jeffrey Braverman brought his family business a long way, and will overcome this setback and achieve steady sales again!
Frantisek Mrazek says
I would start new brand nuts.com with nutsonline.com backend. I might double my business and be competition to myself.