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Comment by joelrunyon | Hacker News Reader

> Moving domains can make a tremendously negative impact on search engine rankings.

Only if you do it wrong. If you do it write, there should be negligible impact.

We don't actually know what happened which is the hard part. They could have done it wrong, or they could have done it right but a bug caused it to be filtered in google search. Maybe some automated process deemed the new side as fraudulent. Last thing anyone wants is a new site with a similar domain stealing SEO.

Moving domains always comes with its risks.

I think that Google removed it from their results intentionally. Google has the ability to restrict results, and for it to be weighted so highly after they "fixed" it, and because they gave no indication of what was wrong, I think the "fix" was to remove it from the blacklist.

However, it doesn't change that I use Gmail and will continue to use it. It's still the better product for the money (free).

The removal and fix need not have been so blatant - a breaking change for some sites might have been prioritized, and the fix to that break may have had other work pushed ahead of it. There doesn't need to be an explicit blocklist or clearlist in play to make some customers more important.

Not exactly free, you pay with your data

Google products have one connecting line in them. They make it easy to adopt and are used to collect data. Whether it is user data or users helping in training a system (captcha, Google voice, ...)

You will usually see a dampening of rankings when moving domains. Redirects do not transfer 100% of authority.

Since August, no.

https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

Thank you for showing me this!

Not sure how I missed it.

I wouldn't risk my business only because a google employee tweeted "30x redirects don't lose PageRank anymore.". Because there is a lot room for different interpretations and open questions.

It shouldn't disappear entirely though. A completely new site shows up faster than this was unavailable.

I would have said this too some years ago, a competitor moved his domain last year with practically no impact. Moving domains today seems much much safer than some years ago.

PS: Same goes for http to https, some years ago you've got a huge huge drop in rankings while today it's a no brainer.

But nobody outside google, yahoo or bing knows exactly what is the 100% correct way.

Moving a domain is always a high risk operation for your search results position.

Start here - https://moz.com/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains

Start there and then read hundreds of other snakeoil tutorials and in the end you still wont know what the correct way is.

Any relatively experience Technical SEO will know how to do this its not rocket science you just have to pay detail attention to the site.

Unfortunately a lot of ecommerce sites are of low quality and coded by the finance directors golfing mates "friends" company.

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